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Boyd Matson interviews Laura Waters Hinson about her documentary film *As We Forgive* on the National Geographic Weekend radio show. Used with permission. Look for a screening at Saint Francis.
“Many people ask me why on earth should a survivor of the genocide in Rwanda forgive someone who murdered either their mother or husband or brother or sister. When you consider that a million people got destroyed by the cruelest means ever known, hacking people to death with machetes and banging children on the walls. Somebody has to tell them this painful message of forgiveness. If we let them be consumed by that ongoing bitterness and anger, it’s like an acidic content in a metal container. It will eventually eat the container up. When they forgive, they get released. Those perpetrators, after they get forgiven, come to us and say, ‘Can you help us to do something to show our remorse?’ And now they are building houses for their victims.” — Bishop John Rucyahana
Robert Redford remembers Natalie Wood. Apropo of my previous post, do a close reading of what you see and hear at minute 4:00+. And ask me what this has to do with Harbor Springs, Michigan.
That's why I married you and you married me!
Home for the holidays in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, on a quiet Christmastide morning, a young man rises early to make sticky buns. He makes a triple batch with extra pecans. He likes sticky buns that way. This is before the man had children and learned that children do not like nuts on stuff, even on sticky buns.
But this story takes place years ago. These sticky buns were made before the kids were made. These buns were the kind that make your mouth water. The man’s mother and father and his brother and sisters, his wife, they would all enjoy them with breakfast.
The man’s father gets up to take another sticky bun. He wants to melt the dab of butter he’s put on top of it. And there, at the Amana Radar Range, he makes the kind of mistake a man makes when he has forgotten himself. Enjoying his family, the father forgets himself, forgets his wife’s instructions on how he is to use the microwave. And he is detected.
The mother says, “Oh Bud, that’s not how you do that!”
The father’s countenance falls. “Oh Ann” he pleads, “this is too how I do it. And what difference does it make?”
[The mother takes the cup of coffee out of the microwave, places a napkin over the cup, sets a saucer beneath the cup, and puts it back in the oven.]
“The difference,” she says, pointing her finger, “is that I’m a perfectionist and you’re not!”
“You’re right, Ann. You’re a perfectionist and I’m not. And that’s why I married you and you married me!”
This is as quick-witted as any repartee between Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby or in Holiday. His father’s retort sounded like something Mr. Grant might have said to Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth.
“That’s why I married you and you married me!” the father said, hopping an inch up in the air as he said it. He put the exclamation point on the sentence not the way you do when you are angry. He put the exclamation point on his sentence the way you do when you tell the punch line of a joke.
The father tries to wrap his arms around his wife. He tries to kiss her. She is vexed, not ready to quit a fight she knows she cannot win. She gives up in his arms and gives in to his kisses. And the young man who did not yet have children laughs so hard he spills his coffee.
Another great moment in the annals of naïve and useless clergy. Here Priam’s priests invoke religion to argue in favor of bringing the values language the Wooden Horse into the city. From Wolfgang Peterson’s movie Troy.
These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers… . [H]e serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah — sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.
This post is for Buckeye Jon Dehmlow. “I’m putting together a special team. With special powers.”
Saint Joseph — whose feast day is today — Saint Francis, Saint Clare, Saint Nicholas, Saint Peter, the Martyrs of Uganda, all appear to Damien Cunningham in the movie Millions.
David Edelstein on *Taken*
In Taken, Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, an ex–Jason Bourne–like spook who wants to make amends for being an absent dad to his 17-year-old daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace), so he whines and pleads with his chilly ex (Famke Janssen) not to let her travel to Paris with her rich girlfriend. It’s a bad world out there, he insists—a bad, bad world. You don’t know. I know. Believe me. I’ve seen things. You don’t want to know. Dismissing him as a hysteric, Kim jets to France and is promptly—I mean, she doesn’t get to pee—snatched by Albanian sex-slavers for sale to sheikhs and sundry other wealthy sadists. This is where Dad gets to prove that he can karate-chop the windpipe of one Albanian while taking out three more with a paper clip, a wad of gum, and a hard stare. (I exaggerate, but not by much.)
The script, by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, panders to macho American wet dreams that feel distinctly antiquated in the new age of American non-exceptionalism. And in a just universe, the idea that rich white American virgins are the prime targets of sex-slavers would make tens of thousands of captive underage Asian girls rise up shouting, “That is the last straw!” I would leave it there except that Taken—in the hands of director Pierre Morel (District B13), with Neeson in nearly every shot—works like gangbusters. The Frenchies have made the filet mignon of meathead vigilante movies.
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The NYMag. I’ve seen the movie. As usual, Edelstein understands what a director wishes to do, and does not fault him for not achieving what he did not attempt. If you go to this movie expecting to see a Merchant Ivory Production, blame no one but yourself. This is Neeson as butt-kicker. In the cinema, the woman I get through the nights with, who prefers her movies genteel, at one point cheered out loud for Bryan Mills, “Yes. Get him!”
Some doors should never be opened.
Kevin Bacon talks with Lt. Col. Michael Strobl about the HBO Film “Taking Chance”
It was impossible to imagine, beforehand, all the ways a film like “Taking Chance” (Saturday, 8-9:30 p.m. EST, on HBO) could work its power. There are no conflicts, no warring sides, no mysteries of character — the usual stuff of drama. The story’s outcome is clear from the beginning. Yet it’s no less clear that “Taking Chance” is not only high drama, but a kind that is, in the most literal way, breathtaking — watching parts of it can make breathing an effort, and those parts come at every turn. It’s no less obvious that this film, about a Marine killed in combat, could have gone wrong in all sorts of ways and did so in none of them. There is in this work, at once so crushing and exhilarating, not a false note.
The credit for that belongs to Lt. Col. Michael Stroble, U.S. Marine Corps, on whose journal the film is based; to producer, writer and director Ross Katz; and, not least, to Kevin Bacon, whose portrayal of the devoted Col. Stroble is a masterwork — flawless in its fierce economy, eloquent in its testimony, most of it wordless, to everything that is going on.
And that is a great deal. The process by which the remains of a fallen Marine are prepared and shipped is exquisitely detailed — details the film spills out at its own quietly riveting pace. All servicemen who have died are provided a uniformed escort home to their final resting places. The colonel — a Desert Storm veteran who is impelled, for reasons made known later in the film, to escort the remains of 19-year-old Lance Cpl. Chance Phelps, killed in Iraq in 2004 — must accompany the body from the Dover Air Force Base mortuary to the lance corporal’s burial place in Dubois, Wyo.
It’s a long trip. Everywhere along the way, he encounters Americans of every age, class and occupation who are transfixed once they understand they are in the presence of a military escort officer taking a serviceman home. That presence is enough. They don’t need the sight of the flag-draped casket. All that they feel they show this uniformed officer, the stand-in for their dead fellow American, for his family, for the funeral service they can’t get to — and the recipient of their grief and regard.
See Dorothy Rabinowitz’s review in the WSJ
Roger Ebert remembers Gene Siskel
He was a bachelor when I first met him, living in an apartment that was said to resemble a bachelor’s nightmare. I never saw it. Few did. When he got serious about Marlene and realized he would sooner or later have to take her there, he asked his sister to clean it up “just enough so I can have a cleaning person come in.” I gather it wasn’t filled with rotting Kentucky Fried Chicken or anything. It was simply filled with everything he had ever brought home and put down, still there wherever it landed, and had never been dusted. He and Johnny Morris made a bet once with a TV set as the wager. When Johnny lost, he got a giant old console set and had it delivered to Gene’s apartment. The delivery guys dumped it inside the door. It was never moved, and from then on the door never opened all the way.
There was always a little of the Yale undergraduate in Gene. Tim Wiegel, his roommate there, later a sportscaster, told me Gene was famous for wearing a Batman costume and dropping out of trees. He studied philosophy, considered law school, decided to take some time off first. “I told my dad I thought I’d like to try a job in newspapers,” Gene said. “He said he’d give me a ride downtown. We had always been a Sun-Times family. For some reason, I never knew why, he dropped me off in front of Tribune Tower.” Less than a year after walking in the door, he was the Tribune’s film critic.
from Roger Ebert’s blog at the Chicago Sun-Times
