Risselada Blog

Under discussion:

Z  (1969)

M  (1931)

Family Guy [Animated TV Series]  (2003)

This blog entry is part of my "movie year countdown round #2".  Read more about that here.

Z

You have to love these one letter titles.  I think one test for the quality of a movie database search engine is to look up the title of this movie or maybe Fritz Lang's M and see how well it handles that.  Spout actually fails in this area, but I think most people here are aware that even though they have a large database of titles, the search engine still has some shortcomings.  I had to look up the names of the directors in order to find these titles.

Anyways Z was a movie that I had a somewhat difficult time following at first.  All of the information coming at me.  I had a difficult time at first recognizing the political context of the world I was entering.  I didn't know who was on what side, and how they were related, and what they stood for.  I didn't realize that Z was based on a novel that was based on real events.  After a while it picked up as I started to put things together.  By the end of the film I was totally taken with it, and excited to watch it over again with commentary (although I would have watched it again without) to see everything over again from the beginning with a better understanding of the context.

When it first begins it seems like it may be a very culturally specific story, but you soon realize this is a universal tail of political power and corruption.  The struggle for power, manipulation, propaganda, repression, assassinations, all of it seems very familiar and is going on and has gone on in every government and society in the world.  You even start to realize that many of the people in the film don't even have names, but are just referred to as The Deputy or The General or The Journalist hinting even more at its universality.  I can't find the exact record but keep running across various claims that this was the highest worldwide grossing non-English speaking film at some point or something along those lines.  The point is, you can see why this had such a universal appeal.

The movie has a style all it's own.  The pacing felt unusual to me, but satisfying.  There are sometimes many quick cuts, including quick cut flashbacks.  These are flashbacks without any dissolve or lingering.  They give you the basic flashback information just as long as is needed and then cut back to the action.  I can't think of many times this kind of flashback is used, other than maybe on Family Guy for a quick joke.

You think at the end of the movie there will be some kind of final satisfaction or justice.  You get it for a moment, only to have it complete reversed again before the credits role.  But then of course there is another kind of satisfaction in having a movie that presents what is really more of the truth.

Rating: 9/10

Under discussion:

Gates of Heaven  (1978)

Vernon, Florida  (1981)

Vernon, Florida

Just as a little bit of interesting but not really essential bit of background information about this movie to begin with, I pulled this from wikipedia:

Originally titled Nub City, this follow-up to Gates of Heaven was initially focused on residents of the Southern town who cut off their own limbs as a way to collect insurance money. After Morris' life was threatened by the subjects of the film, he re-worked Nub City into Vernon, Florida.

Nothing about cutting off limbs or insurance ever gets brought up in this film, at least from what I remember.  What we get is one of the simplest forms of the talking heads that you expect from any Errol Morris.  Lots of eccentric personalities that aren't too related to each other either, other than that they all reside in this same town.  However a lot of them do seem to have a connection with animals.  After Gates of Heaven and after seeing some of his later films, Morris seems to find a lot of people who have some kind of special or unusual connection with animals.  Obviously the kind of animals a person is drawn to and the way they view them can say a lot about a person.

I don't have too much more to pick apart in this movie.  It's certainly entertaining most of the time, but not profound or overly entertaining enough to raise it to the level of one of my favorites.  Still worth checking out especially if you've seen anything else by Morris and liked it.

Rating: 8/10

Under discussion:

Jesus Camp  (2006)

Iron Man  (2008)

Lake of Fire  (2007)

Jesus Camp

Some folks at the church community I'm a part of, MissioDei (it's Latin for Mission of God, I'm just saying because a lot of people ask), set up a monthly gathering to watch a movie and discuss.  The guy who arranged it picked this movie to start with.  The idea for each movie was to have a certain theme within it to discuss afterwards, not necessarily picking apart the movie so much as expanding the idea of the themes to how they relate to our lives and neighborhoods.  The movie we actually did after this one was Iron Man where we talked about redemption.

I was sort of dreading this movie because so many people talked about how angry it would make you.  I guess I was prepared for something a lot worse.  I wasn't too surprised that stuff like this was going on in our country though.  It wasn't any kind of revelation to me.  Not that it isn't upsetting to see children indoctrinated from such a young age into an "us vs. them" kind of mentality with all of the battle metaphors.

But the consideration as Christians in our community wasn't to point at these people and say, "Wow what a bunch of wackos.  They really give Christ a bad name." but to say how much are we really like them in some of the ways that we would like to criticize.  We had some really good and long conversations about different church communities each of us had grown up in.  How much of what we believe is something just because we were taught it at a young age, and how much if it is something we have come to know and believe through our own adult experience and person journey through our spiritual life?  When do we try to mix up church with our political beliefs and try to use one of them for or against the other?

I guess some of the most shocking stuff in this movie is the political stuff.  Abortion is such a flagship political issue for so many people that embody an entire larger set of political agendas.  (See the fantastic documentary Lake of Fire which I will blog about at a later date).  To see these kids basically used for the political purposes of adults is rather frustrating.  At one of the anti-abortion rallies or whatever you call them, they had all of the children there with big strips of tape over their mouths.  I can't remember exactly their reason for doing this.  Maybe to represent the unborn children that had been silenced by being aborted.  But to me the image of these children with tape over their mouth seemed more to reveal how these children had no voice of their own.  Their own voice was covered up so other people's words could come out of their mouths instead.

So again, maybe this will be an eye opener of a movie for some people, although not anything as shocking to me as I was anticipating from what I'd been hearing.  What I would find interesting though is a documentary made maybe fifteen or twenty years from now showing what some of the primary children featured in this movie are like by that time in their lives.  Will they retain their zeal?  If so will their opinions on many of these political issues become more varied?  I guess everyone is different, but there's no doubt that what happens to you at a young age will shape to some extent forever.

Rating: 7/10