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Lisa Marie Reviews An Oscar Nominee: The Power of the Dog (dir by Jane Campion)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s interesting how quickly a film can be forgotten.

Based on a novel by Thomas Savage, The Power of the Dog was one of the most anticipated films of 2021.  It was considered to be a front runner for Best Picture even before it was released.  Even though everyone knew 2021 was going to be the year that the Academy finally got around to giving Will Smith the Oscar, there was still a lot of excitement about the idea of Benedict Cumberbatch playing a sinister and closeted cowboy named Phil Burbank.  The first teaser featured Cumberbatch being wonderfully creepy.  I remember that I was certainly looking forward to it.

When it finally showed up in theaters and then premiered on Netflix, the reviews were …. respectful.  They were positive but they weren’t exactly enthusiastic.  This was the type of film where people noted that it was well-made and well-acted but it seemed to just be missing a little something.  The film was nominated for a lot of Oscars but, in the end, it only won one, for Jane Campion’s direction.  (And Campion, unfortunately, had to spend the days leading up to the ceremony dealing with a stupid controversy over a very mild joke she made to Serena and Venus Williams about how making a movie was more difficult than playing tennis.)  People admired the skill that went into The Power of the Dog but, in the end, it was CODA that captured the hearts of the Academy.  CODA may not have been as technically well-made as Power of the Dog but CODA was a film that made people cry.  And, in 2021, voters who had spent an entire year being told that they would die a horrible death if they even dared to leave their house without putting on a mask, decided to vote with their hearts.

Taking place in 1925 Montana, The Power of the Dog centers on two prominent ranchers, the Burbank brothers.  Phil Burbank is a man’s man, a bluff and hearty type who lives to conquer the land and who doesn’t have much use for women.  Phil looks down on anything that he considers to be a sign of weakness, like showing emotion or making paper flowers.  And yet, Phil is also fiercely intelligent and Ivy League-educated, a man who is capable of playing beautiful music but who has decided not to.  Phil is cruel and manipulative.  Perhaps the only person that he’s ever respected is his mentor, Bronco Henry.  Phil’s admiration for Henry and his collection of gay pornography tells us all we need to know about why Phil is so obsessed with maintaining his “manly” image.

His brother, George (Jesse Plemons), is a much more sensitive soul than Phil and yet, he allows himself to be dominated by his brother.  It’s not until George meets and marries a widow named Rose (Kirsten Dunst) that he starts to come out of his shell.  Angry that Rose seems to be freeing George from his domination, Phil goes out of his way to make her life miserable, even preventing Rose from playing the piano.  In her loneliness, Rose starts to drink.  Phil, meanwhile, sets himself up as a mentor (and potentially more) for Rose’s sensitive and introverted son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who does like to make paper flowers but who also has an obsession with his late father’s medical books….

The Power of the Dog is a film that I had mixed feelings about.  On the one hand, I did respect the craft that went into making the film.  The Montana scenery was both beautiful and ominous.  And I thought that both Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst gave award-worthy performances.  Dunst, especially, really captured the pain of Rose’s life on the ranch.  Plemons, meanwhile, made George’s gentle nature compelling, which is not always the easiest thing for an actor to do.  At the same time, Benedict Cumberbatch was miscast as Phil and Kodi Smit-McPhee’s performance was a bit too cartoonishly creepy for the film’s ending to really be as shocking as it was obviously meant to be.  Ultimately, the main problem with the film was that Campion, as a director, kept the audience from really connecting with the characters.  The film was well-made but almost as emotionally remote as Phil Burbank and it left the audience feeling as if they were on the outside looking in.  While the book leaves you feeling as if you’re actually in Montana and allows you into the hearts of all of the characters, even Phil, the movie leaves you feeling as if you’ve just watched a really carefully-made film that ultimately treated you as scornfully as Phil treated Rose.

Because it is such a well-made film, The Power of the Dog is a film worth watching but it’s not necessarily a film that leaves you with any desire to watch a second time.  For all the excitement that the film generated before it was released, it was largely forgotten after it lost the Oscar for Best Picture to CODA.

Retro Television Review: Homicide: Life on The Street 2.2 “See No Evil”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC!  It  can be viewed on Peacock.

This week, no one’s innocent.

Episode 2.2 “See No Evil”

(Dir by Christopher Menual, originally aired on January 13th, 1994)

Watch out!  Stanley Bolander’s whining about his divorce again!

Ned Beatty was one of the great character actors and he is certainly convincing in the role of Stanley Bolander, the veteran Baltimore homicide detective who has seen the worst that humanity has to offer and who spends most of his time annoyed with his partner, John Munch.  But, as good as Beatty is, I still groan whenever Bolander starts to talk about his ex-wife and his divorce.  His bitterness was a recurring theme during the first season.  It was annoying but it was understandable because the divorce was still recent.

But now, we’ve started the second season.  It’s time move on, Big Man!

This episode finds Bolander very reluctantly taking part in sensitivity training.  He avoids meeting with Dr. Carrie Weston (Jennifer Mendenhall) until Giardello threatens to suspend him without pay.  Bolander is stunned when Dr. Weston turns out to be sympathetic to his anger over his divorce.  Bolander ever tries to ask Dr. Weston out, just for Weston to inform him that she’s just gotten out of a bad relationship and that she believes “birds of a feather should flock together” and, speaking of birds, did you know that there are lesbian seagulls?  Bolander gets the hint.  Myself, I would probably lie about being a lesbian just to get out of having to spend any more time listening to him cry about his divorce.

Far more interesting than Bolander’s angst were the two cases at the center of this week’s episode.  Chuckie Prentice (Michael Chaban) shoots his dying father (played, in a powerful and intimidating performance, by Wilford Brimley) in the head.  Though Chuckie claims that his father committed suicide, Lewis has his doubts and takes Chuckie to the station for interrogation.  Detective Beau Felton just happens to be Chuckie’s best friend and, after Chuckie tells him that his father specifically asked to be put out of his misery, Felton tries to convince Lewis to say that the shooting actually was a suicide.  At first, Lewis refuses but eventually, he agrees to look the other way while Felton takes Chuckie to wash his hands and destroy any evidence of gunpowder residue on his skin.  Without any definite evidence proving the he fired the gun, Chuckie is free to go and his father’s death is ruled a suicide.

This was a powerful story and it was all the more effective because it refused to come down on one side or the other.  Both Felton and Lewis presented their positions well and the episode ended not on a note of triumph but on a note of weary resignation.  Chuckie is free to go on with his life and his father is no longer in pain but Lewis is going to be haunted by his decision to allow evidence to be destroyed.  Personally, I’m against assisted suicide and I felt it was selfish for Chuckie’s father to ask Chuckie to pull the trigger.  But, having spent the previous few months trying to come to terms with my own father’s passing, I could understand what Chuckie was feeling.  There really are no easy answers.

As for the other case, it involved the shooting of a drug dealer.  The dealer was shot in the back.  A patrolman claimed that he slipped and his gun accidentally fired during the pursuit of the dealer.  Pembleton had his doubts about whether the shooting was really an accident or a case of police brutality.  Even after Giardello warned him that pursuing the case would turn “brother against brother” in the police force, Pembleton insisted on asking every police officer on the scene to turn in their guns for testing.  “You son of a bitch, Pembleton,” Giardello muttered.

And again, this was a storyline that worked because it refused to present an easy solution.  The dead man was a criminal and he was shot while fleeing the cops.  Even though the cop that slipped was eventually cleared of having fired the shot that killed the dealer, it was obvious that the shot did come from a cop.  Pembleton, with his black-and-white view of his job, was determined to find the truth, regardless of the professional consequences.  Giardello, with years more experience than Pembleton, spoke from the heart when he told Pembleton that investigating the case would bring harm not just to the cop who shot the dealer but to every cop working the streets, regardless of whether they were involved or not.  Felton could convince Lewis to look the other way.  Pembleton was not willing to do the same thing.

It was a strong episode, even with all of Bolander’s nonsense.  Perfectly acted, morally ambiguous, and fiercely intelligent, this is an episode that I’ll be thinking about for a while.

Novel Review: Mazes and Monsters by Rona Jaffe

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1981 novel, Mazes and Monsters, tells the story of four wealthy college students who deal with the ennui of being rich and privileged by obsessively playing a role-playing game called Mazes and Monsters.

That’s right!  The game is Mazes and Monsters and most definitely not Dungeons and Dragons, even though both games are basically about people wandering around in dungeons and fighting monsters and searching for treasure.  (For the record, I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons or any other role playing game and I’ve never really had any desire too.  That said, I did enjoy those episodes of Freaks and Geeks and Community.)  One of the four players is Robbie Wheeling, who has never recovered from the death of his brother.  When the players decide to move their game into the tunnels underneath their college, Robbie has a total break from reality and thinking that he actually is his M&M character, he flees to New York and lives on the streets.  Desperate for money and food, he turns to prostitution but ends up stabbing the first man who picks him up.  Agck!  He never should have played that game!

Mazes and Monsters is usually described as being one of the key works of the 80s Satanic Panic and there’s certainly an element of that to be found in the plot.  But the game is actually a fairly small part of the book.  The majority of the book just deals with teenagers struggling with the transition of adulthood and figuring out where they belong in the world.  The book isn’t quite as hysterical as its been described.  If anything, the book almost makes the case that the game is helpful to the players in that it gives them an escape from all the ennui.  Robbie was mentally unstable long before he played the game and it’s hard not to feel that something would have eventually set him off.

This is a rare case where the movie version is better than the book, if just because the movie features Tom Hanks as Robbie.  Robbie mistaking a man for a demon and stabbing him?  That’s really sad.  Tom Hanks doing it?  That’s cinematic magic!

Song of the Day: The Godfather by Nino Rota

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to both Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton!

Along with being two of America’s best actors, Duvall and Keaton also co-starred in the first two Godfather films.  They didn’t share many scenes in the second film (though there was at least one Duvall/Keaton scene that was filmed but not included in the final film) but, in the first film, they have a memorable moment in which Keaton (as Kay) asks Duvall’s Tom Hagen to send a letter to Michael in Sicily.  Hagen politely refuses.  When Kay notices a car that has obviously been bombed, Tom replies with bland good cheer, “Oh, that was an accident.  Luckily, no one was hurt!”

In honor of these two amazing performers and my favorite movie of all time, today’s song of the day is Nino Rota’s theme from The Godfather.

Made-For-Television Movie Review: Skokie (dir by Herbert Wise)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Skokie, a 1981 made-for-television movies, opens in a shabby Chicago office.

A group of men, all wearing brownshirts and swastika armbands, listen to their leader, Frank Collin (George Dzundza).  Collin says that they will be holding their next rally in the town of Skokie.  Collin explains that Skokie has a large Jewish population, many of whom came to the United States after World War II.  Collin wants to march through their town on Hitler’s birthday.

If not for the swastika and the brownshirt, the overweight Collin could easily pass for a middle-aged insurance salesman, someone with a nice house in the suburbs and an office job in the city.  However, Frank Collin is the head of the American National Socialist Party. a small but very loud group of Nazis who specialize in marching through towns with large Jewish populations and getting fee media attention as a result of people confronting them.  Making Frank Collin all the more disturbing is that he isn’t just a character in a made-for-television movie.  Frank Collin is a real person and Skokie is based on a true story.

The Mayor (Ed Flanders) and the police chief (Brian Dennehy) of Skokie are, needless to say, not happy about the idea of modern-day Nazis marching through their city.  Though they inform Collin that he will have to pay for insurance before he and his people will be allowed to hold their rally, they know that the courts have been striking down the insurance requirement as being a violation of the First Amendment.  While the mayor and the police chief worry about the political fallout of the rally, the Jewish citizens of Skokie debate amongst themselves how to deal with the Nazis.  Bert Silverman (Eli Wallach) and Abbot Rosen (Carl Reiner) argue that the best way to deal with Collin and his Nazis is to refuse to acknowledge them, to “quarantine” them.  As Rosen explains it, Collin is only marching to get the free publicity that comes with being confronted.  If he’s not confronted, he won’t make the evening news and his rally will have been for nothing.  However, many citizens of Skokie — including Holocaust survivor Max Feldman (Danny Kaye) — are tired to turning their back on and ignoring the Nazis.  They demand that the Nazis be kept out and that, if they do enter the city, they be confronted.

With the support of the ACLU, Collin sues for his right to march through Skokie.  The ACLU is represented by Herb Lewishon (John Rubinstein), a Jewish attorney who hates Collin and everything that he stands for but who also feels that the First Amendment must be respected no matter what.  When Lewishon is asked how he, as a Jew, can accept a Nazi as a client, Lewishon relies that his client is the U.S. Constitution.

Skokie is a thought-provoking film, all the more so today when there’s so much debate about who should and should not be allowed a platform online.  (Indeed, Collin and his Nazis would have loved social media.)  Lewishon argues that taking away any group’s First Amendment rights, regardless of how terrible that group may be, will lead to slippery slope and soon everyone’s First Amendment rights will be at risk.  Max Feldman, and others argue that the issue isn’t free speech.  Instead, the issue is standing up to and defeating evil.  The film gives both sides their say while, at the same time, making it clear that Frank Collin and his Nazis are a bunch of fascist losers.  It’s a well-acted and intelligently written movie, one that rejects easy answers.  Needless to say, at a time when so many people feel free to be openly anti-Semitic, it’s a film that’s still very relevant.

As for the real Frank Collin, he would eventually be charged with and convicted of child molestation.  After three years in prison, he changed his name to Frank Joseph and became a writer a New Age literature.  He’s looking for Atlantis but I doubt they’d want him either.

Film Review: And The Band Played On (dir by Roger Spottiswoode)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I live in a very cynical time.

That was one of my main thoughts as I watched 1993’s And The Band Played On.

Directed by Roger Spottiswoode and featuring an all-star cast, And The Band Played On deals with the early days of the AIDS epidemic.  It’s a film that features many different characters and storylines but holding it all together is the character of Dr. Don Francis (Matthew Modine), an epidemiologist who is haunted by what he witnessed during the Ebola epidemic in Africa and who fears that the same thing is going to happen in America unless the government gets serious about the mysterious ailment that is initially called “gay cancer” before then being known as “GRID” before finally being named AIDS.  Dr. Francis is outspoken and passionate about fighting disease.  He’s the type who has no fear of yelling if he feels that people aren’t taking his words seriously enough.  In his office, he keeps a track of the number of HIV infections on a whiteboard.  “Butchers’ Bill” is written across the top of the board.

Throughout the film, quite a few people are dismissive of Dr. Francis and his warnings.  But we, the audience, know that he’s right.  We know this because we know about AIDS and but the film also expects us to trust Dr. Francis because it’s specifically stated that he worked for the World Health Organization before joining the Center For Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia.  As far as the film is concerned, that’s enough to establish his credentials.  Of course, today, after living through the excesses of the COVID pandemic and the attempts to censor anyone who suggested that it may have begun due to a lab leak as opposed to some random guy eating a bat, many people tend to view both the WHO and the CDC with a lot more distrust than they did when this film was made.  As I said, we live in a cynical time and people are now a lot less inclined to “trust” the experts.  To a large extent, the experts have only themselves to blame for that.  I consider myself to be a fairly pragmatic person but even I now find myself rolling my eyes whenever a new health advisory is issued.

This new sense of automatic distrust is, in many ways, unfortunate.  Because, as And The Band Played On demonstrates, the experts occasionally know what they’re talking about.  Throughout the film, people refuse to listen to the warnings coming from the experts and, as a result, many lives are lost.  The government refuses to take action while the search for a possible cure is hindered by a rivalry between international researchers.  Alan Alda gives one of the best performances in the film, playing a biomedical researcher who throws a fit when he discovers that Dr. Francis has been sharing information with French scientists.

It’s a big, sprawling film.  While Dr. Francis and his fellow researchers (played by Saul Rubinek, Glenne Headly, Richard Masur, Charles Martin Smith, Lily Tomlin, and Christian Clemenson) try to determine how exactly the disease is spread, gay activists like Bobbi Campbell (Donal Logue) and Bill Kraus (Ian McKellen) struggle to get the government and the media to take AIDS seriously.  Famous faces pop up in small rolls, occasionally to the film’s detriment.  Richard Gere, Steve Martin, Anjelica Huston, and even Phil Collins all give good performances but their fame also distracts the viewer from the film’s story.  There’s a sense of noblesse oblige to the celebrity cameos that detracts from their effectiveness.  All of them are out-acted by actor Lawrence Monoson, who may not have been a huge star (his two best-known films are The Last American Virgin and Friday the 13 — The Final Chapter) but who is still heart-breakingly effective as a young man who is dying of AIDS.

Based on a 600-page, non-fiction book by Randy Shilts, And The Band Played On is a flawed film but still undeniably effective and a valuable piece of history.  Director Roger Spottiswoode does a good job of bringing and holding the many different elements of the narrative together and Carter Burwell’s haunting score is appropriately mournful.  The film ends on a somber but touching note.  At its best, it’s a moving portrait of the end of one era and the beginning of another.

Film Review: The Last Innocent Man (dir by Roger Spottiswoode)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1987’s The Last Innocent Man, Ed Harris plays Harry Nash.

Harry is a criminal defense attorney, one who specializes in defending people who have been charged with committing murder.  He’s good at his job but he’s not sure that he’s happy with his life.  He went into the law to save people from Death Row but years of getting acquittals for guilty people have taken their toll on Harry’s psyche.  His most recent client was Jonathan Gault (David Suchet), a man accused of having killed his wife.  The verdict was “not guilty” but Harry suspects that Gault may have been guilty of both what he was charged with and also countless crimes for which he hasn’t been charged.  It doesn’t help that Gault confronts Harry in a parking lot and says he wants Harry to co-write a book about how he got Gault acquitted.  Gault proceeds to tell Harry that he did kill his wife, before suddenly laughing and saying that he’s only joking.

Despite all of the money and the fame, Harry needs a break from dealing with guilty people.  He tells his shocked partner that he will be temporarily stepping back from their practice.  Along with being burned out, Harry is also interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with Jenny Stafford (Roxanne Hart).  Jenny is married but she assures Harry that she is in the process of getting a divorce from her husband, Philip (Darrell Larson).

However, when Philip is arrested and accused of murdering a policewoman who was working undercover as a prostitute, Harry finds himself defending Philip in court.  Philip swears that he’s innocent of the crime and that he’s never even been with a prostitute.  He claims that, when the murdered occurred, he was at home with his wife.  Jenny is willing to collaborate Philip’s alibi, even though Harry suspects that she’s lying.

As you can probably guess, there are plenty of twists and turns to the plot of The Last Innocent Man.  Unfortunately, they’re not exactly shocking twists and turns.  The Last Innocent Man is a courtroom drama and it pretty much sticks to the rules of the genre, which means a lot of snarky comments between Harry and the prosecutor and also plenty of scenes of various lawyers snapping “Objection!” and demanding a recess.  This is the type of film where people fall apart on the witness stand and the audience in the courtroom murmurs whenever something shocking happens.  The Judge can’t pound that gavel hard enough to make The Last Innocent Man anything more than a standard courtroom drama.

That said, director Roger Spottiswoode keeps the action moving at a quick-enough pace and Ed Harris is ideally cast in the role of the morally conflicted Harry Nash.  As well, there’s an entertaining supporting performance from Clarence Williams III, cast here as a cocky pimp, and David Suchet is chillingly evil as the worst of Harry’s clients.  The Last Innocent Man doesn’t quite reach the Hitchcockian heights that it was reaching for but, still, fans of courtroom dramas will enjoy it or, at the very least, show a little leniency in their judgment.

Film Review: Noriega God’s Favorite (dir by Roger Spottiswoode)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Everyone’s an expert on the Panama Canal nowadays.

Largely, that’s a result of President-elect Donald Trump openly musing about taking the canal back from Panama.  As soon as Trump uttered those words, every self-appointed pundit on every social media site in existence immediately jumped over to Wikipedia and skimmed over the articles on Panama, the Panama Canal, and Teddy Roosevelt.  Then, after Jimmy Carter died, those same people jumped onto Wikipedia and skimmed articles about Carter selling the canal to Panama for a dollar and the controversy that followed.  For weeks, it has been impossible to look at Twitter or Bluesky or even Mastodon without seeing someone giving their opinion on the canal, the 1989 American invasion of Panama, and the connection between the CIA and Manuel Noriega, the man who served as Panama’s military dictator for most of the 80s before being deposed and tossed into prison for being a drug smuggler.

Myself, I know better than to get my information from Wikipedia.  Instead, I get my information from movies.  For that reason, I attempted to educate myself on Panama and the canal by watching 2000’s Noriega: God’s Favorite.

Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, Noriega: God’s Favorite opens with a title card informing us of the story so far.  Manuel Noriega was born in the slums of Panama.  He grew up in poverty and was shunned because his mother was not married to his father.  Noriega spent his youth doing whatever he had to do in order to survive.  He was clever and ruthless but it wasn’t until he entered the Panamanian National Guard that he was able to really use those skills to his advantage.  Noriega became a CIA asset and worked his way through the ranks.  In 1983, with the support of American intelligence, Noriega became the de facto dictator of Panama, even though he never officially held any sort of title or executive position.

The film follows Manuel Noriega (Bob Hoskins) over the course of his final years as Panama’s dictator.  He’s portrayed as being a ruthless man who often pretends to be a buffoon in order to get his enemies to underestimate him.  He works with the CIA but still passes along intelligence to Fidel Castro (Michael Sorich), who is seen hitting on Noriega’s wife (Denise Blasor) during a visit to Cuba.  Noriega presents himself as a family man while having a number of mistresses.  He claims to an ally in the United States’s War on Drugs while attending cocaine-fueled parties.  He presents himself as being a pragmatist while actually being very superstitious.  A CIA agent (Edward Ellis) wins Noriega’s trust by manipulatively interpreting Bible verses for him.  When an army officer (played by Nestor Carbonell) tries to lead a coup against Noriega, he can only watch helplessly as Noriega personally executed all of his co-conspirators, going so far as to even chop off one man’s hands.  By the end of the scene, Noriega is drenched in blood but he’s undeniably happy.  Everyone knows that Noriega is an impulsive and dangerous dictator but the CIA allows him to stay in power until he starts to become an inconvenience.  Once Noriega’s notoriety starts to overshadow his usefulness, the U.S. promptly invades and Noriega’s power crumbles around him.

Bob Hoskins might seem like a strange choice to play a South American dictator but he does a good job in Noriega, playing the title character as being both a charismatic dictator and also an overgrown child who has never gotten over the struggles of his youth.  (Early on in the film, he is seen getting treatments to smooth his pockmarked skin, an indication that all the power in the world can’t cure lifelong insecurity.)  In the end, Noriega has much in common with the gangster that Hoskins played in The Long Good Friday.  Noriega is ruthless enough to become powerful but he ultimately falls victim to his own hubris.  When you’re in charge of something as valuable as the Panama Canal, the last thing you should do is anger the country that built it.

Film Review: The Shoes of The Fisherman (dir by Michael Anderson)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1968 film, The Shoes of The Fisherman, opens in a snowy Siberian labor camp.  For the past twenty years, this camp has been the home of Kiril Pavlovich Lakota (Anthony Quinn), the Ukrainian archbishop of Liviv.  Kiril is unexpectedly released by Russia’s new leader, Piotr Ilyich Kamenev (a very British Laurence Olivier).  After explaining to Kiril that Russia and China are on the verge of nuclear war due to a famine that has been instigated by U.S. sanctions, Kamenev tells Kiril that he is being released on the condition that he tell no one about the conditions at the Russian labor camp.  Kiril starts to protest just for Father Telemond (Oskar Werner), the Vatican’s representative, to say that the conditions have already been agreed to.

In Rome, Kiril meets the Pope (John Gielgud), who makes the humble Kiril a cardinal, over Kiril’s objections that he just a “simple man.”  Later, when the aged Pope suddenly dies, Kiril is unexpectedly elected, as a compromise candidate, to succeed him.  Still humble and considering himself to be a simple man with a simple mission, Kiril suddenly finds himself as one of the most revered and powerful men on the planet.  With Father Telemond as his secretary, Kiril tries to make the Vatican responsive to the needs of the people and sets out to bring peace between the Russians and the Chinese. That turns out to be easier said than done, especially when Telemond himself is eventually accused of heresy for his progressive views.

(And yes, Telemond is a Jesuit….)

The Shoes of the Fisherman is a type of film that should be familiar to anyone who has any knowledge of the Hollywood studios in the 60s.  It’s the type of big and self-serious film that was meant to tell audiences, “You won’t find anything this opulent and important on television!”  The cast is designed to appeal to everyone.  Anthony Quinn and Laurence Olivier are there for the older viewers (especially the older viewers who made up the majority of the Oscar voters in 1968) while, for the younger voters, there’s handsome Oskar Werner as a Jesuit who interpretation of the Gospels is so radical that even Pope Francis would probably tell him to step back a little.  For the older, anti-communist viewers, there are scenes that portray the harsh conditions at a Siberian labor camp.  The commies put Kiril in prison so he must be one of the good guys.  And for the younger, more liberal viewers, there was the suggestion that the threat of World War III was largely due to the actions of the American government.  And, just in case there was still anyone who thought that television was preferable to a prestige picture, TV star David Janssen shows up as a cynical reporter whose wife (played by Barbara Jefford) is a doctor who Kiril helps to get some medicine for one of her dying patients.  Director Michael Anderson includes enough sudden zoom shots to let younger viewers know that he’s with them while still directing in a stately enough manner to appeal to the older viewers.

The end result is a film that is big and grand but also rather slow.  The film gets bogged down in subplots that don’t really add much to the overall story.  We spend way too much time with the reporter and his wife.  Anthony Quinn does a good enough job as Kiril, giving a rather subdued performance by Quinn standards.  (A scene where Kiril recites a Jewish prayer for a dying man is wonderfully acted by Quinn, who seems to truly be emotionally invested in the film’s message of togetherness.)  Laurence Olivier is not at all convincing as a Russian but still, he has the stately bearing of a man used to being in power.  Like many of the studio productions of the late 60s, The Shoes of The Fisherman tries a bit too hard to strike a balance between old school Hollywood and the counterculture and the film ultimately feels rather wishy-washy as a result.  It’s a noble film with good intentions but it’s not particularly memorable.

THE CHILDREN OF HUANG SHI (2008, directed by Roger Spottiswoode) – The incredible story of English adventurer George Hogg!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

My wife and I love to watch movies based on true stories and real people. I had never heard of English adventurer George Hogg prior to 2008, which was the year that I found out that Chow Yun-Fat would be co-starring in a film based on Hogg’s life. Chow Yun-Fat is my favorite living actor, so I make it a point to watch every film he’s in. I even watched the horrendous DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION, even worse, at the theater!! As I looked into the film a little closer all those years ago, I thought Hogg’s real-life story had major dramatic potential. I thought the cast was interesting as well. At the time, Jonathan Rhys Meyers was starring in a popular series called THE TUDORS, where he played King Henry VIII. He seemed ready for the role of real-life hero George Hogg. Radha Mitchell had somewhat recently starred in the Denzel Washington action film, MAN ON FIRE, which I’m very fond of. And coolest of all, outside of Chow Yun-Fat of course, was the casting of Michelle Yeoh, another favorite of mine from her years in Hong Kong films. She and Chow Yun-Fat were captivating together in CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON. And finally, I saw that Roger Spottiswoode would be directing the film. The veteran filmmaker has had a hand in some of my favorite films, from editing HARD TIMES with Charles Bronson, to writing 48 HRS. with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy, and even directing the excellent action film SHOOT TO KILL, with Sidney Poitier and Tom Berenger. I was expecting a good, solid film!

The story opens in 1937 with British reporter George Hogg (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) worming his way into Nanjing, China, to cover the Japanese occupation of the city. While there, he sees and photographs horrific violence against the Chinese people. Discovered by the Japanese authorities with his camera, it appears he’s headed for execution. But luckily for Hogg, just prior to having his head lopped off, he’s saved by Chinese resistance fighter Chen Hansheng (Chow Yun-Fat). Injured while escaping, Hogg awakens under the care of Nurse Lee Pearson (Radha Mitchell), who is also taking care of Chen. Needing time to recover from his wounds, Hogg is sent to a boy’s orphanage in Huang Shi by Chen and Nurse Pearson. Initially reluctant to get involved with the 60 or so orphans, Hogg eventually begins to try to improve their living conditions. He begins teaching the boys, and he comes up with a way to guarantee needed food and supplies in town when he strikes a deal with the local merchant, Mrs. Wang (Michelle Yeoh). Over the next few years, it seems like everything is going pretty well. But when the Chinese nationalist military camps outside of the orphanage, and some of their leaders come to the orphanage and threaten to take some of the boys into their army by force, Hogg makes the decision that they should leave the area. Thus begins an incredible journey over mountains and through deserts to the city of Shandan, which is approximately 700 miles away, but in an area that Hogg believes will be safe. Will they be able to survive the journey and start all over again with a better life in Shandan?

With THE CHILDREN OF HUANG SHI, Director Roger Spottiswoode delivers a solid, but certainly not spectacular, movie. Even if writers James MacManus and Jane Hawksley take some liberties with the actual events for dramatic effect, the basic story about George Hogg working to improve the lives of these orphaned boys and then leading them to safety across hundreds of miles of treacherous terrain and away from war, is good stuff. I’m glad I watched it, and at times it managed to stir up my emotions. With that said, there still seemed to be something missing. I don’t think the movie as executed ever moved me as far emotionally as I hoped it would. Thinking back on the performances, I found Jonathan Rhys Meyers only adequate as George Hogg. He delivers some good moments, but I didn’t leave the film really thinking that much about him. I’d say that Radha Mitchell did better with her role as the nurse who saves Hogg, and who eventually falls in love with him. Her character had some complexity, and I felt myself more drawn to Mitchell’s performance. Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh are in true supporting roles. Chow has so much natural charisma, that you can’t help but like his character, and anytime he’s on-screen things pick up. He’s actually quite fun as resistance fighter “Jack” Chen. The problem is that there are large chunks of the film’s 125-minute running time that he’s nowhere to be seen. Much of the same can be said of Michelle Yeoh. She’s very effective when she’s on the screen, but it seems she has even less screen time than Chow. It’s hinted at that her character has hidden layers of depth, but there just isn’t enough time to really develop anything. She is so beautiful, and I did enjoy every time she appeared. Thanks to cinematographer Xiaoding Zhao (THE CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER), there are many times that the movie itself is just so beautiful to look at. It appears that some of the most beautiful places on earth were captured for this film.

THE CHILDREN OF HUANG SHI has an awesome ace up its sleeve at the very end of the film, and by the end I mean the credits. As the credits begin to roll, some of the actual boys who lived through these harrowing experiences, now older men, appear on screen and provide some of their memories of the journey and of Hogg. That kind of stuff always gets to me and it did here as well. It was a strong ending to a decent film.