myDylarama

Noah

Coco Green — 2014-04-21T10:11:47Z

'Noah' is certainly appropriately titled. This isn't a big screen portrayal of one of the great biblical stories of Noah and the Ark. It's a story about a group of white Europeans/Americans/New Zealanders with accents that have no connection to the Middle East where the Biblical story takes place (beyond the names they didn't even try!!). Given that the Ark wasn't mentioned in the title, and my knowledge of the actors who were cast in leading roles, I should've taken these clues that this film was not for me. But as an immigrant I'm always reluctant to turn down an invitation anywhere; so my friend asked me to go, and I went.

As a socialist woman raised as an Evangelical Baptist, who is now a backsliding Evangelical Baptist (ie a believer that no longer attends church), I found no joy in this retelling. First, I should say that I liked the special effects. The flood, the gathering animals and the rock angels were pretty amazing. In addition the design of the Ark was lovely—there were cubbies for all the cute animals, and you got a feel for the struggle of building it over many years. There was also a nice message about the role of people to protect plants and animals, so Noah is a super environmentalist and vegan.

Now on to everything I hate. The most egregious error is the way faith is practiced in the film. 'Noah' shows angels, magic, hypnotism and mysticism, but no prayer or fasting. There's no active religious community, it's just Noah and his family roaming in what looks like Turkey. When they eventually come into contact with society it's like Thunderdome, and people are dressed like they are from the Dark Ages, although the women wear tight trousers.

Noah himself never prays in the film, but looks up to the sky to get a feel for what God wants. Looks like a contemporary Mainline Christian God and not Jewish God from 10,000 years ago to me. This just speaks to my pet peeve about the portrayal of religion in film generally. Religious people are nuts; usually wild eyed and loud mouthed, boorish and ignorant, narrow minded and provincial. When it's a black Church all bets are off—it's theatrical, comedic and slightly inappropriate. We rarely see the Christian socialists, liberation theology in action, Arab Christians or Ethiopian Coptics for that matter.

Since the film is absolutely full of creative license and doesn't intend to re-tell the story of Noah and the ark it is telling that the women characters are made to be so whiney and weepy. I mean, Noah can be an environmentalist but not a feminist? Why was he so dismissive of his wife? Why didn't she speak to God, too? When Noah is unsure of 'The Creator's' message he doesn't go to his wife, but travels up the mountain to his Grandpa. Real problems for real men, I suppose. Noah's daughter in law was another thinly drawn character who thought she wasn't a 'real woman' because was barren. The writers couldn't come up with a better response than that?

Also, like Schoolhouse Rock's 1970s maths video, Noah's children are shown as tweens and teenagers, with all their angst and yearnings for independence (ie annoying) instead of married men as they are in the bible. The biblical version is more comforting for modern readers as we can hope that Noah's descendants just had to marry cousins. I won't spoil 'Noah' for anyone, but let's just say leaving the theatre I shivered at the thought of reproduction for this family.

I'm disappointed that 'Noah' missed the best parts of the story. The real magic in the Noah and The Ark story is the fact that despite being an alcoholic, God chose him. Despite ridicule from society, Noah and his kin built the Ark.

In conclusion, I wish the producer would've just made the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is an older and, even as a Christian I have to admit, a cooler telling of the-flood-that-ended-the-world story. The Epic is longer than the bible version with a more complex journey which would be a dream for any screenwriter. Happy Easter.

Dir: Darren Aronofsky, 2014

City of Life and Death (Premiere in Paris)

Abla Kandalaft — 2010-08-27T11:09:30Z

Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death deals with the surprisingly and depressingly little known Battle of Nanjing and its aftermath (otherwise referred to the Nanking Massacre). The events took place in 1937 as the Japanese Army captured the then-capital of the Republic of China, Nanjing. The several weeks that followed saw tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians killed. Lu Chuan's The city of life and Death is grand cinema at its best. It packs all the brutality and energy of a war film with none of the overpowering mishmash of explosions, blood and other myriad bangs and crashes.
This is in part due to the fact that the film oscillates between massive scale, epic battle scenes and intimate close-ups as we follow the personal trajectories through the carnage of several real and fictional figures; including a Chinese soldier, a schoolteacher, a Japanese soldier, and John Rabe, a civil servant on the payroll of the Nazi administration who ended up saving thousands of Chinese civilians. Subjected to a different treatment, the savagery of the attacks, sadism of the soldiers and piles and heaps of cadavers would have been over the top and defeated the purpose of the film. And yet, the images are impressive and powerful and at times surreal. Lu Chuan's approach allows us to empathise with the various characters, most interestingly the afore-mentioned John Rabe.
We are also given an insight into the experience of a Japanese soldier. One would expect the usual they-weren't-all-bad anti-hero, dramatically shifting away from blind loyalty to his army as the brutality of it all dawns on him, tearing up as he witnesses injustice. None of that happens. Lu Chuan's approach is much more subtle. The soldier's immediate concerns as he leaves the battleground revolve around the much more mundane, and yet all too human crush on his hired “comfort woman”. We get a sense of his growing discomfort but he remains part of the action and the conquering army. Lu Chuan's refusal to dehumanise his characters doesn't take anything away from the horror of the events unfolding before our eyes. It is a powerful film that has criticism from Chinese and Japanese audiences alike. And yet, it ends on a surprisingly uplifting note.

Already released in France, it will be screened at the London Film Festival on 28 October.

See Q and A with director Lu Chuan in Unexplored: Q and As section

Dir: Lu Chuan, 2010

Clash of the Titans

Kelu13 — 2010-07-20T11:48:59Z

My expectations weren't particularly high when I went to see the Clash of the Titans. And I must say I was looking forward to it, perhaps moved by some masochistic feeling that compels me to go see films that are going to provoke my inner academic (knowing a few things about Greek mythology). And yet I'm always up for a laugh.

The movie in all its blockbuster glory fulfils what it sets out to do: it has drama, romance, fights and big scorpions. My concern is that it promises to tell a story and tells another one, underlying the point that many scriptwriters, unable to come up with new ideas, are happy to plunder the treasures of the ancient myths that almost everybody has heard of but few are familiar with the gory details.

As a person planning more or less to make a livelihood out of classical studies, shouldn't I be delighted to see these ancient stories freed from the dusty libraries where they were held like mystic scripture reserved for an elite cabal of classics students and intellectual spinsters, glad to look upon those less fortunate (?), yet unfamiliar with the Iliad and the Odyssey? Fair enough, it's a film but my question is why do they have to include, say, the actual names and a couple of original storylines and jumble them up in an incoherent story, greatly diminishing the legend's potential appeal to the younger generations.

Let's start with the obvious.

The legend of Perseus is known mostly because of his conception. Zeus visited Danae in the guise of golden rain, provoking outrage and despair from the young virgin's father, Acrisios. In fact, he was aware of a prediction that his grandson would one day kill him. Which he did by accident. The problem is that in Perseus's legend, there is in fact no actual baddie and to make a good blockbuster you need at least one or two of those.

But I wouldn't mind these changes, if the scenario hadn't included some pretty useless incoherencies. The movie is based on the succession of improbable creatures that spring up randomly along the way, catching the elite squad unawares, as it clambers along a landscape that defies even basic geographical understanding.

There is the Kraken, plucked straight from Scandinavian mythology, with no relation whatsoever with ancient Greece, replacing what in the original legend was an aquatic creature Perseus killed with rocks, on his way home, Medusa's head in a bag, a trophy collected after a pointless bet he had made.

There are the Djinns, creatures from the Arabian Nights, (well, vague relations at best, for some reason decidedly alienish and dressed in blue). Once again, I'm still looking for any relation to ancient Greece. There are massive scorpions, emerging from… not sure where exactly; I think the congealed blood of another random character but I think I might have actually dreamt that. Perhaps they were leftover props from the Mummy 2 the studios gave a last moment of glory to before chucking them out.

But I think I laughed most when I first caught sight of Pegasus. It was obvious they couldn't leave a winged horse out of the film, and that's ok, considering he is directly related to the legend of the Medusa. So what was the problem? Maybe that he was born from the blood that ran from the Gorgons' head when it was cut by Perseus and could not exist before her death, ah, just to be pedantic, Perseus wasn't the one to ride him, it was in fact Bellerophon when he went to kill the Chimera. But let's overlook this; a winged horse is always cool.

Then we have the gods. Blatantly restricted in their movements by their Power Rangers suits in a palace copied and pasted from computer game Civilization, the gods even carry light sabres. Fair enough, but about the ‘Greeks' gods? The ones no human actually ever took on?

Spectacular special effects, entertaining action scenes, and, ok, let's admit it, decent actors for the most part, the film could have been a pretty good one, had the team bothered to equate the various characters with the actual deeds they undertook and not pick other ones at random, as was the case with Perseus or Andromeda. I must say I'm sad for their eight children that according to the movie, will never be born, the hero preferring to shack up with ghost Io, a character from a different myth : an ex lover that had been changed into a cow by Zeus. But, eh, why not.

Lots of “why nots” tend to kill a movie's credibility.

But, if you liked it, rejoice, because a number two is in the making. At least this time, they wont have to pretend to follow an original legend.

Dir: Louis Leterrier, 2010