“The Ledge” equals “God for Dummies” – film review
Can’t wait until Thanksgiving dinner to witness a pointless conversation between a pompous fundamentalist Christian and a sneering atheist? Then “The Ledge” is the movie for you.
This shrill and pedantic exercise in speechifying gives us “deep” conversations about religion and the afterlife that wouldn’t pass muster in a freshman Philosophy 101 study group, delivered with all the earnestness and lack of subtlety of the old “Davey and Goliath” show. (If that Christian cartoon had featured Liv Tyler’s breasts, that is.)
Tyler, fresh off playing a former drug addict who married Rainn Wilson as a way to get a grip on her life in “Super,” broadens her range by playing a former drug addict who married Patrick Wilson to get a grip on her life in “The Ledge.” When these two move in down the hall from committed atheist Charlie Hunnam, who becomes Tyler’s boss when she gets a job working at the hotel he manages, things start spiraling out of control.
The movie opens, in fact, with Hunnam standing on the roof of a tall building, with policeman Terrence Howard trying to talk him down. Howard’s character, a devoted Catholic, is having his own problems, having just learned that he’s sterile. Since he and his wife have two children, this news comes as some surprise.
Hunnam (who after years of working Stateside, still occasionally lets his British accent surface) tells Howard all about how he and Tyler grew close together, despite the fact that he and Wilson had lots of arguments about whether or not there’s a God or if gay people will burn in hell. These issues could make for interesting drama, but director Matthew Chapman’s heavy-handed script gives us pat back-stories to prop up and “explain” his two-dimensional characters.
Wilson, you see, used to be a hedonist before he discovered the Lord, while Hunnam’s faith was shattered when his daughter died. Because heaven forbid these two would have arrived at their conclusions via, oh, reflection or philosophical inquiry.
The four leads are such cut-outs that you really don’t care if Hunnam jumps or not. And Hunnam’s character is so flimsy that you figure that even if he does leap, he’ll float down to the street like a page from this terrible screenplay.
“Neither God, nor Master” film angers Tunisian Islamists
Six months after Tunisia’s uprising, religious tension is rising over the limits of freedom of expression, as Islamists challenge the dominance of liberals in what was once a citadel of Arab secularism. Last week several dozen men attacked a cinema in Tunis that had advertised a film publicly titled in French ‘Ni Dieu, Ni Maitre’ (No God, No Master) by Tunisian-French director Nadia El-Fani, an outspoken critic of political Islam.
Police later arrested 26 men, but Salafists — a purist trend within political Islam advocating a return to the ways of early Muslims — gathered outside the justice ministry two days later to demand their release, leading to scuffles with lawyers. Security forces were heavily deployed in central Tunis to stop protests by Salafists after Friday prayers last week.
Secular media and intellectuals have reacted with alarm, warning that freedoms in Tunisia — a bastion of secularism under 23 years of tough police rule by Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali — are in danger of being lost if Islamists across the spectrum of Islamist politics are not stopped. “This is a foretaste of what awaits us if firm measures are not taken against these sorcerers’ apprentices, since nothing will stop them attacking hotels, nightclubs or ordinary people sitting in a restaurant,” wrote Taieb Zahar in the French-language monthly Realites.
Tunisia was the launchpad for pro-democracy protest movements that have spread across North Africa and the Middle East since Ben Ali was forced from power in January. A slow transition to a democratic system is causing tension. An interim president and cabinet will not hold elections until October for a special assembly to write a new constitution that will allow for parliamentary and presidential polls at a later stage.
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Family, Taliban scare off actresses in Afghan film industry
A young bride silently sobs on the floor watching her mentally disturbed husband gorge on chicken, rub his greasy hands through his hair and scream at her for more, just another chapter in the couple’s violent life together. Film director Saba Sahar anxiously watches the scene by the cameraman, squatting in blue jeans and wearing a bright pink headscarf. “Cut!” she calls.
The first Afghan female in her profession, Sahar, 36, has become a household name after acting and directing for more than half her life. She is adored by Afghan women. Like other Afghan directors, Sahar says finding actresses is her top challenge in an ultra-conservative Muslim country where many view acting as un-Islamic and inappropriate for women.
“Some Afghans think cinema is a bad place for girls,” said 19-year-old Deba Barekzai, who plays the young bride in Sahar’s 15-part TV series. “Working in cinema has caused me lots of problems and difficulties.”
Afghan-Canadian director Nelofer Pariza said family pressure stopped several of her actresses from showing up on set when filming 2009′s “An Act of Dishonour”, a real-life story about an honour killing. “It was really sad. Fear would actually stop them from coming to work,” Pariza told the audience last month following the film’s first public screening in Afghanistan.
Further complicating their challenges are the threats the film industry receives from a resurgent Taliban, who banned television and women from most work before their austere rule was toppled by U.S.-backed Afghan forces a decade ago. Amid escalating violence across Afghanistan in the tenth year of fighting in the NATO-led war, fear of the Taliban is ever present across many sectors of society.
Read the full story by Amie Ferris-Rotman and Sayed Hassib here.
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Freudian take on Vatican life makes Cannes film festival smile
The Vatican got a dose of Freudian analysis at Cannes on Friday with “Habemus Papam,” a gentle Italian comedy about a newly elected pope who gets cold feet when the weight of his responsibility dawns on him. The film by Italian director Nanni Moretti drew laughter and healthy applause from critics on day three of the Cannes film festival, where the official selection of movies has so far leaned in the direction of dark realism and social commentary.
Farcical and humane, Habemus Papam (We Have a Pope) casts wide open the door of the notoriously secretive Holy See, as red-robed cardinals converge in a locked chamber to elect a pope under the expectant gaze of millions of Catholics. When the votes are counted and white smoke billows from the Vatican’s dome, the pope-elect played by French actor Michel Piccoli, 85, is led to a balcony to address the faithful — only to freeze up before his momentous task, paralyzed by anxiety.
“The image that struck me the most was that of a newly elected pope a few meters from the (Vatican’s) balcony, unable to advance,” Piccoli told journalists after the screening. “The role reinforced my conviction to dare to talk about one’s anxieties — this pope is an exceptional man.”
Panicked by the break in protocol, Vatican officials take the unorthodox step of bringing in Rome’s top psychiatrist, played by Moretti himself, to explore the pope’s psyche before a room full of cardinals in one of the movie’s funniest scenes.
New Israeli film claims discovery of nails from Jesus’s cross
Could two of the nails used to crucify Jesus have been discovered in a 2,000-year-old tomb in Jerusalem? And could they have mysteriously disappeared for 20 years, only to turn up by chance in a Tel Aviv laboratory?
That is the premise of the new documentary film”The Nails of the Cross” by veteran investigator Simcha Jacobovici, which even before its release has prompted debate in the Holy Land. The film follows three years of research during which Jacobovici presents his assertions — some based on empirical data, others requiring much imagination and a leap of faith.
He hails the find as historic, but most experts and scholars contacted by Reuters dismissed his case as far-fetched, some calling it a publicity stunt. Many ancient relics, including other nails supposedly traced back to the crucifixion, have been presented over the centuries as having a connection to Jesus. Many were deemed phony, while others were embraced as holy.
Jacobovici, who sparked debate with a previous film that claimed to reveal the lost tomb of Jesus, says this find differs from others because of its historical and archaeological context.
“What we are bringing to the world is the best archaeological argument ever made that two of the nails from the crucifixion of Jesus have been found,” he said in an interview, wearing his trademark traditional knitted cap. “Do I know 100 percent yes, these are them? I don’t.”
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Amid row with Israel, Turkish officials attend Istanbul Holocaust Day
In a rare show of unity with Istanbul’s dwindling Jewish community, government officials attended the country’s first official commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of Nazi concentration camps.
“For generations in Istanbul, we have lived together with love, tolerance, fraternity and without discrimination, and we are extremely determined to continue living this way,” Istanbul Governor Avni Mutlu said before lighting a candle with Chief Rabbi Isak Haleva at Neve Shalom Synagogue on January 27. Neve Shalom was one of two temples targeted in a 2003 bomb attack in Istanbul that was blamed on al Qaeda. Twenty-one Muslims and six Jews were killed, and hundreds more were wounded.
Turkish Jews, whose numbers have dwindled to about 18,000 in a country of almost 74 million Muslims, have in recent years again felt under threat as relations between Israel and Turkey, each other’s closest allies in the Middle East until recently, have deteriorated.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a devout Muslim, castigated the Israeli government in early 2009 for its incursion into the Gaza Strip. Relations hit a nadir on May 31, when nine pro-Palestinian Turkish activists bringing aid to Gaza were killed by Israeli commandoes during a raid of their ship, the Mavi Marmara, in international waters.
Erdogan has condemned anti-Semitism and said he differentiates between Turkey’s Jews and Israeli policies. Still, both episodes kicked off popular anti-Israeli protests in Turkey that frightened Turkish Jews already fretful about their survival in a city that had served as a safe haven for centuries.
“At times of tension, as we saw with the Mavi Marmara incident, some Jews have concerns about their personal security, and in general many wonder what will happen in 20 years with the strain they feel just from their dwindling numbers,” said Louis Fishman, an expert on Turkish religious minorities at Brooklyn College in New York. Hundreds have quietly left for Israel in the last decade in an unofficial migration, he added.
Most Istanbul Jews are descendants of Sephardim who fled the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. During World War Two, when 6 million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust, Turkish diplomats helped rescue a few thousand expatriate Turkish Jews, and neutral Turkey offered safe passage to several thousand others.
Wilders’s anti-Islam film screened in Dutch court
The hate trial of Dutch anti-Islamist politician Geert Wilders, who will have a powerful shadow role in the Dutch government, resumed on Wednesday with a showing of his controversial film that criticises the Koran.
The screening in court of Wilders’s 2008 film “Fitna,” which accuses the Koran of inciting violence, threatened to interrupt the trial for a second time in a week when defence lawyer Bram Moszkowicz objected to comments from presiding judge Jan Moors.
When one complainant said she did not wish to see the film, which accuses the Koran of inciting violence, Moors said: “I can understand that” — prompting a sharp response from Moszkowicz who said such a remark is simply not allowed. Moors stressed he was not expressing any judgement over the film.
Monday’s proceedings had to be halted when Wilders, after invoking his right to remain silent, accused judges of “scandalous” bias and demanded they be replaced. The court rejected the claims on Tuesday, the same day that Dutch Christian Democrat MPs approved a coalition pact with the Liberals that relies on support from Wilders’s anti-Islam Freedom Party.
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France charges man for burning, urinating on Koran
A blogger who filmed himself burning the Koran and urinating on it to put out the flames is to appear in court in eastern France, charged with incitement to religious hatred, legal sources said on Tuesday.
Threats in September by a Florida preacher to hold a high-profile protest burning of the Koran sparked global outrage among Muslims, and triggered violent protests in Afghanistan in which one protester was shot dead.
In the film, which was posted on the Internet, the 30-year-old blogger from Bischheim near Strasbourg is seen sitting in his living room wearing a devil’s mask and tearing pages out of a copy of the Koran to make paper airplanes.
He then throws the airplanes at two upended boxes, arranged to look like the Twin Towers in New York, before burning the book on his balcony and urinating on it.
“He claims full responsibility. He says he’s not a right-wing extremist but that in France he can burn the Koran, just as he can burn a Winnie the Pooh book, without worrying about the consequences,” Strasbourg deputy prosecutor Gilles Delorme told Reuters.
“MOOZ-lum” film depicts challenges for black U.S. Muslims
The makers of a new movie about family life for black Muslims in America want to highlight challenges facing followers of Islam, just as Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” revealed the racism and harsh realities facing black youth in Brooklyn two decades ago.
“MOOZ-lum” was filmed in Michigan, which has a large Muslim population, and premiered to packed theaters at the Urbanworld Film Festival in New York last Friday.
“I hope people can walk out of the theater thinking more and trying to understand what we’re facing here,” said director Qasim Basir, adding the movie’s portrayal of discrimination mirrored his own Muslim-American experience. “I’m hoping to give Muslim-Americans a film that reflects them. I want it to be something the audience can look at and say, ‘This represents me,’” he told Reuters in an interview.
The movie, which has yet to find a distributor and so is not in commercial cinematic release, emerges amid a heated dispute over a planned Muslim cultural center in New York. Urbanworld founder Stacy Spikes said the buzz surrounding “MOOZ-lum” had been helped by the debate.
Read the full story here. Below is the official trailer from YouTube andhere’s a link to the film’s Facebook page, which already has over 66,000 fans:
Vatican beatifies the Blues Brothers … well almost …
Jake and Elwood, the loveable if hapless characters played by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in the classic 1980 film The Blues Brothers, have finally gotten Vatican recognition for their “Mission from God.”
To mark this week’s 30th anniversary of the film, which became a cult classic and spawned a fashion of wearing black hats and dark sunglasses to parties, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano dedicated a full page and no fewer than five articles to it.
One of the articles says there is “no lack of evidence” that The Blues Brothers can be considered “a Catholic film.”
Also, check out L’Osservatore Romano‘s front page (scroll to bottom).
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