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"Seven Pounds," now on DVD, is worth catching

Cinema has seasons, just like baseball and football. Qualifying dates for the Academy Awards, the advent of the summer blockbuster season and prestigious film festivals affect the release dates of movies in the theaters and on DVD.

That’s a roundabout way of saying that we’re in post-Oscars DVD season. The films that scored big are just now in home release, which means I’m finally catching them. (People who don’t know how to behave in a civil manner have ruined moviegoing for me. I always walk out more annoyed than entertained by boors who insist on talking, picking ringtones on their cells and endlessly crumpling cellophane wrappers.)

Thanks to Netflix, my husband and I will catch up with films worth watching months after they’re in theaters. That’s why we only recently saw Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Doubt, The Wrestler and The Reader. We also saw Seven Pounds, a Will Smith movie that received no nominations, but that was more interesting than some of the big winners at the Oscars. (See the trailer here.)

We were disappointed with Slumdog Millionaire, which is actually a pretty depressing film along the lines of an ultra-grim Satyajit Ray drama sprinkled with child prostitution, torture, a kid covered in excrement and children blinded for profit than the “feel-good” film that critics and friends proclaimed it to be. Unless you count feeling good that the guy wins money on a quiz show or that everyone breaks into a nonsensical song in a train station at the end (how could I make that up?), then Slumdog Millionaire is actually a very feel-bad movie.

The Wrestler was a very good character study of a broken-down performer whose life is in tatters. There’s rough language, sexually-charged nudity and a head-banging metal score that won’t be to everyone’s taste. The script and the performances by Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei were excellent, as was the sense of entering a world more exotic than a fantasy kingdom in Lord of the Rings. The pity and disgust that we feel for Rourke’s character is very real throughout the film. And I loved those scenes of the aging wrestler working at the deli counter!

Performances also made The Reader, although I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone offended by nudity in films. There’s a lot of it, some very explicit, by Kate Winslet and David Kross, who had to wait to turn 18 before he could be filmed nude. Winslet plays an older woman who sleeps with a 15-year-old student while she hides her past as a concentration-camp guard. Their scenes are integral to the plot but, again, they’re explicit. The issues explored in The Reader are complex and thought-provoking:  it’s actually about the postwar generations in Germany and how they have dealt with the specter of Nazism.  

To a parochial school kid like me, Doubt had the most frightening villain since Dracula. Actually, it was Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius, a holy terror of a school principal who opposes the efforts of a progressive priest to open the Church to the changes coming during Vatican II. (When I was 11, I feared nothing more than our parochial school principal, Sister Renee.) The film is essentially a two-character play with the principal and the priest warring over her suspicions that he has molested the only African-American student in the school. 

The film succeeds in sparking discussions of what concepts like “doubt” and “truth” actually mean. With rich performances and a literate script by its playwright, John Patrick Shanley, Doubt also vividly captures the look and feel of Catholic schools in New York during the 1960s, even down to the candy store near the school and the hissed “Sit up straight!” admonitions from nuns.

We were totally flummoxed when it came to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The film takes up hours you’ll never get back in your life. There was a lot of computer-generated trickery to age Brad Pitt backwards from birth as an old man to death as an infant and way too many flashbacks and flash-sideways.  (The latter is a funny term for confusing plots from Funny Farm, a goofy Chevy Chase comedy we love.) The aging of Pitt and the other actors is done with skill but, as my husband put it, “To what end?” There was nothing memorable about the film and not much beyond weirdness.

The film that we’ve enjoyed the most in recent weeks has been Seven Pounds, a very touching story that tackles big issues with more success than the overblown Benjamin Button. Will Smith plays an IRS agent who becomes a part of the lives of a gentle blind musician, a young woman with heart disease and several other characters who are ill. For most of its running time, the film is a mystery: We don’t know why the IRS agent cares about these people or how they figure into the plot.

(The film is more enjoyable if you don’t know anything about the plot; unfortunately, a snide reviewer from one the major dailies didn’t care for the film and he divulged one of the points in the story in a review I read. Watch the film not knowing much about it and you’ll enjoy it more.)

With patience, you discover the plan that the IRS agent has for the other characters and the reason for his quest. Along the way, there’s a sweet romance, redemption, sacrifice, soul-searching and the notion that one moment can change many lives. There was no foul language, no violence and a story that raised questions about life and death.

In fact, when a single act of mayhem occurs near the end, it’s shocking because it’s the only one like it. When we watch endless explosions, murders and shootings  in other films, we become innured to death and it becomes insignificant. In Seven Pounds, it’s never that.

The film didn’t score nominations at the Academy Awards, but it was an intelligent film for adults. That made it a prize winner in our book, whether the Academy agreed or not.

“I would like to say that I’m sick and tired of people exploiting the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own personal propaganda. I would like to suggest to Mr. Penn that his winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation and a simple ‘Thank you’ would have sufficed.”

Every word–minus the mention of actor Sean Penn–was uttered by screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky at the 1978 Oscars. The target of Chayefsky’s censure was Vanessa Redgrave, who had won Best Supporting Actress earlier that evening for her role as a woman helping the underground during World War II in the film Julia. The cowardly applause for Chayefsky’s words and the booing during Redgrave’s acceptance speech were indicative of what’s allowed as free speech in Hollywood.

Vanessa Redgrave and Sean Penn are both brilliant actors known for their fiery political stands, but the similarity ends there. Redgrave’s words weren’t well received by pro-Israel Hollywood and Penn’s words were lauded by pro-gay Hollywood, hence the difference between booing and hissing and cheering and kissing for essentially the same act during an award telecast.  

A little background on Ms. Redgrave: in 1977, she had funded and narrated a documentary titled The Palestinian that explored the position of that displaced nation. Jewish Defense League and its leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane, whom even the Israeli government had labeled a racist, burned Redgrave in effigy to protest her support of Palestine and her Oscar nomination.  

When Redgrave won, she thanked the Academy for refusing to be intimidated by “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums – whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world, and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression.”

The boos began there, but Redgrave wasn’t intimidated by disapproval, either. Chayefsky then took it upon himself to upbraid her for her opinion of Rabbi Kahane’s tactics. Redgrave continued her acting career and has distinguished herself as an ardent supporter of human rights, including the abuses at Guantanamo and the war in Iraq.

Wait, isn’t Sean Penn known for the same positions? Yes but, after he won Best Actor for his role as a gay politician in Milk, Penn didn’t discuss Guantanamo or Iraq: he was cheered for saying that anti-gay religious protesters don’t share his same right to freedom of speech because he disagreed with their position. Here’s what Penn said:

For those who saw the signs of hatred [italics mine] as our cars drove in tonight, I think it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect, and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren’s eyes if they continue that way of support. We’ve got to have equal rights for everyone.

Sean Penn may not have known that some of the “signs of hatred” outside the Oscars were directed at Jerry Lewis by disability and gay-rights activists who are of the opinion that he demeans them when he calls them his “kids.” Lewis has been quoted as saying that muscular dystrophy makes one “half a person.” Gays don’t like his use of the derogatory term  “fag.” (An online petition sought to cancel Lewis’ humanitarian award at the Oscars.)

Who could hate Jerry Lewis, who has raised about a billion dollars for MD research and whose politically incorrect terminology reflects his age and probably not his true feelings? The droll way that Carroll O’Connor stretched out the one syllable in that derogatory term for gays was one of his classic Archie Bunker routines in All in the Family.  By contrast, kids today use the term “gay” to describe something shoddy or corny and not to describe sexual orientation. Some of the kids I’ve heard using that expression are too young to know how the word evolved from meaning “happy” to meaning “homosexual.”

Gay activists can attack Jerry Lewis for one word, but religious people bear “great shame” for expressing their beliefs. Whose ox is being gored? Free speech cannot be reserved for popular beliefs or for ones we agree with.  “The test of democracy is freedom of criticism,” as David Ben-Gurion said. Unpopular free speech, free speech we don’t agree with and free speech guaranteed by the Constitution are one and the same.

Some film critics had predicted a Hollywood protest against the voters who struck down Proposition 8, California’s same-sex marriage law and they were right. Milk won Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor and Dustin Lance Black and Sean Penn excoriated those who voted against Proposition 8 which, by the way, passed by a margin of 52 percent to slightly less than 48 percent. 

Ninety-six percent of gays and lesbians voted for it and 83 percent of those who never attend church also favored it. Those are huge numbers, but the majority of heterosexuals and churchgoers voted against it and their numbers are much larger.

Calling religious beliefs “hatred” because they oppose your own is free speech, but calling homosexuality a sin is also free speech. Both are protected. When free speech gives way to violence, it stops being free speech and becomes hate speech.

Paddy Chayefsky took offense at Vanessa Redgrave’s political statement and then made his own political statement about hers. Sadly, no one dared to counter Sean Penn’s political statement with an opposing view. Hollywood is too mealy-mouthed to espouse values like religious beliefs, chastity and goodness. For every kid-friendly Marley and Me, my daughter’s favorite film last year, there are 20 or 30 gory, violent films with nothing for audiences that don’t want to be dragged through raw sex and inhumanity at the movies.

Had it not been for Mel Gibson’s immense star power and his religious integrity, The Passion of the Christ would not have been produced in Hollywood. In mainstream films, religious people are always intolerant, repressed, hateful fools who are never the heroes.

Free speech belongs to everyone, whether it’s expressed by Sean Penn, Mel Gibson, Vanessa Redgrave or the protesters outside the theater. It seems that courtesy toward those espousing opinions you don’t agree with is another value that Hollywood no longer possesses.

Just about every year since I was 10 or so, I’ve watched the Academy Awards. During many of those years, I would have seen all of the nominees and had a stake in who won. This year, I’ve seen only two of the films nominated–The Dark Knight and WALL-E–only because, in one case, I braved sitting in the theater and getting annoyed and, in the second, because the film was already on DVD. As much as I love films, it’s just too difficult to sit in a movie theater these days.

I love getting lost in a film and movie audiences today won’t let me. The endless unwrapping of candy, talking, children running wild at films that are inappropriate for them, cell-phones ringing (and being answered) and the general lack of how to behave in public are too much to take. TV has turned a generation of moviegoers into boors who think they’re sitting in their living rooms when they’re out in public. Thank God for Netflix!

This year, there were several films that my husband and I wanted to catch: Doubt, The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire, The Changeling and Frozen River were just some of the ones I would have seen in the theater. Instead, I’ll be watching them at home once they’re available on Netflix.

Even though I was a film major for some of my years in college and even though the anticipation of opening credits in a movie is still a great thrill, films in the theater are no longer a pleasure I can enjoy. These days, I watch films alone or with my family. Audiences have turned me into a curmedgeon and home is the only safe place to get lost in the magic of the movies.

I was reading an online selection of the best film scenes from the silents to the present day and I found it difficult to read many of the scenes from the past 20 years. In the scripts from the time before sound to the end of the 1960s, actors spoke eloquently and writers wrote skillfully–without profanity. Today’s films can’t seem to avoid it.

The modern scenes from a host of films, some of them Academy Award winners, dropped more “f-bombs” than I cared to count. In the case of Good Will Hunting, a sweet story with a wonderful cast, the gratuitous use of the f-word made the script impossible to read and the film difficult to watch. Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas…the list goes on. Whether Quentin Tarantino sits at his Final Draft screen and actually types endless four-letter words or whether he lets his actors “create,” the trend is tiresome as well as a lazy way to write dialogue.

Some of my favorite film scenes are from the days when writers were more creative in how they crafted scenes. A film that’s always worth seeing is On the Waterfront, a beautifully written movie that I never tire of. There’s a particularly beautiful scene played by Karl Malden, whose character, Father Barry, is a socially-conscious priest guiding the longshoremen in his parish to resist the intimidation of the mobsters who’ve taken over their union. After a worker who had promised to turn in the mobsters is killed in a staged accident, Father Barry goes to the hold of a ship for an impromptu homily. (To see the entire script, click here.)

FATHER BARRY
Some people think the Crucifixion
only took place on Calvary. They better wise
up. Taking Joey Doyle’s life to stop him from
testifying is a crucifixion— Dropping a sling on Kayo
Nolan because he was ready to spill his guts
tomorrow— that’s a crucifixion. Every time the
mob puts the crusher on a good man— tries to
stop him from doing his duty as a citizen— it’s a
crucifixion. And anybody who sits around and lets it happen,
keeps silent about something he knows has happened—
shares the guilt of it just as much as the Roman soldier
who pierced the flesh of Our Lord to see if He was dead.

(A mobster then tells Father Barry to go back to his church.)  

Boys, this is my church. If you don’t think
Christ is here on the waterfront, you got another
guess coming. And who do you think He lines up
with—

He sees why some of you get picked and some
of you get passed over. He sees the family men
worrying about getting their rent and getting food
in the house for the wife and kids. He sees them
selling their souls to the mob for a day’s pay.

What does Christ think of the easy-money boys
who do none of the work and take all of the gravy?
What does He think of these fellows wearing
hundred-and-fifty-dollar suits and diamond rings—
on your union dues and your kickback money?
How does He feel about bloodsuckers picking
up a longshoreman’s work tab and grabbing
twenty percent interest at the end of a week?

How does He, who spoke up without fear
against evil, feel about your silence?

You want to know what’s wrong
with our waterfront? It’s love of a lousy buck. It’s
making love of a buck— the cushy job— more
important than the love of man. It’s forgetting
that every fellow down here is your brother in
Christ.

But remember, fellows, Christ is always with you—
Christ is in the shape-up, He’s in the hatch—
He’s in the union hall— He’s kneeling
here beside Nolan and He’s saying with all
of you—If you do it to the least of mine,
you do it to me! What they did to Joey, what they
did to Nolan, they’re doing to you. And you. And
YOU. And only you, with God’s help, have the
power to knock ‘em off for good!
(turns to Nolan’s corpse)
Okay, Kayo?
(then looks up and says, harshly)
Amen.

Father Barry’s homily is beautifully written and speaks to the power of Christian principles. It has force and poignancy…and no foul language. In this case, screenwriter Budd Schulberg wove a scene without one profane word. Nothing in Pulp Fiction is as good as this scene; it never fails to move me. The film is worth seeing to catch the nuances in the characters who are witnessing Father Barry’s speech and the abuse the priest takes from the mobsters who pelt him with rotten fruit and objects that gash his head.

Profanity has become so overused in films that many of us don’t notice it anymore. The occasional use of a foul word that sets the mood or establishes the character doesn’t offend me, but the constant reliance on certain words in lieu of originality is insulting. One of my favorite filmmakers, Martin Scorsese, is just as guilty as hack writers and directors who overuse the f-bomb when other words would suit the project better.

On a positive note, Scorsese’s upcoming film project promises to be a film we could take our children to see. His 2010 release is going to focus on the 17th century martyrdom of the victims of Nagasaki, whose deaths established a toehold for Christianity in Japan. (Ironically, the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the cradle of Catholicism in Japan. The atomic destruction of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 left the shell of the cathedral as a reminder of this crime against humanity.) Top names like Daniel Day Lewis and Benicio del Toro are said to be in Scorsese’s cast.

When a film about the Nagasaki victims is news I’m excited about and films bursting with profanity are the usual fare, we who appreciate quality films have to rely on old favorites for entertainment. Here’s hoping a “Father Barry” scene is somewhere in the pages of Scorsese’s film script.