JimBell Blog

Naturally, the bishop has to come to his senses and recognize this Christian roots among the poor and recognize this love for his wife. Although difficult to criticize such a well-intentioned and spirited movie, one note rings false. The angel makes two speeches in which he praises the bishop’s wife as one of the rare people who knows how to create a heaven on earth no matter what the circumstances, when this is simply not true. She is an ordinary—and ordinary looking—wife neglected by a busy husband. And, yes, the skating scene goes on too long. But there is so much good acting, witty dialogue, and funny scenes that the movie is a delight.

            WalMart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005) says that WalMart buys goods as cheaply as possible and sells them at a good profit. It prices its goods as cheaply as possible, thus making it appealing to customers and hard on the competition. The store also pays its clerks rather low wages. The documentary slams WalMart for this behaviour. The film tugs at our heart strings by showing small town hardware stores going out of business and sales associates not able to afford health care. Excuse me! The documentary could just as easily have been proud of WalMart for being a capitalist success. Thus the documentary avoids going deeper into the fundamental question: If WalMart is capitalist and successful, and if you do not like WalMart, what are the alternatives? And it avoids this question: Who, but the everyday consumer, made low-cost WalMart such a huge success? Why do they value low cost over everything else?

Under discussion:

The Usual Suspects  (1995)

            The Usual Suspects was on my list of favourite movies of all-time, so I rewatched it. Although it is well-crafted, I thought much less of it the second time around. I—and many others—thought the movie was so clever when it came out, but its essence is disappointingly simple: The entire story is a fiction created by “Verbal” Kint in a policeman’s office. So what do we know “actually” happened. Five guys were in a line up in New York, they went to California, they attacked and burned a vessel in the harbour and only Verbal survived. Everything else was a masterful screen for the fact that Verbal was, far from being a petty con artist, a master criminal who wanted to get at a guy on the boat who was going to testify against him. The problem, I think, is where the cleverness lies. Because one of the cops recognizes a minute too late that Verbal has pulled the names of this characters off the messy bulletin board in the office, we are amazed and impressed by Verbal’s audacity and brilliance. But this is a cheap thrill. The impressive bit of cleverness is how Verbal masterminded the entire operation, and, of course, we see none of that.

Jim Bell