THINGS TO COME: GODZILLA

If you read this blog, then I’m sure you’re already aware of the upcoming Godzilla movie and have already seen this trailer…

Yeah, I’m a little giddy over it ( he says as he glances at the 6 inch tall Godzilla action figure sitting on his desk). If only May wasn’t so far away. Fortunately, thanks to the magic of marketing, we don’t have to wait until then to get a bit of new Godzilla action…

If Madison Avenue keeps that up, I may have to stop fast forwarding through commercials from now on.

I’m sure I’ll be reviewing the new Godzilla for Aleteia, but if for some reason I don’t, you can rest assured I will do so here. Until then, if you’re curious as to what I thought about the original Godzilla (Gojira), you can check out this old post. Hey, you can never get too much Godzilla.

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For Aleteia this week, I took the family to see Son of God, the theatrical reworking of scenes from The History Channel’s hit miniseries The Bible. The film’s a mixed bag. While it’s not an artistic triumph like Passion of The Christ nor anywhere near as fun as something like The Ten Commandments, it’s at least respectful of the source material. Plus, as I discuss in my review, it does have a couple of scenes that are surprisingly Catholic for a movie made by protestants.

Still, if you don’t feel like paying box office prices to see some recycled TV footage, The Happy Catholic has a number of suggestions for movies to rent or stream for Lent. Jordan J. Ballor from the Acton Institute, on the other hand, has only one old movie on his mind, but it’s a classic.

Not all classics are created equal, though. That’s why Catholic Skywalker has compiled a list of otherwise great movies he feels are ruined by their third acts. I have to say I agree with him on Exorcist III, but if you know anything at all about that film, you know William Peter Blatty was forced by the studio to film the last 15 or 20 minutes that way. So yeah, the director thought the final act ruined the film as well.

But enough of all this talk about good movies. You don’t come to this blog for that kind of thing. So if you’re hankering for a bad movie fix, why not head over to Crisis Magazine where K. V. Turley takes a look at I, Frankenstein. Along with the expected awfulness, Mr. Turley believes he may just have stumbled upon the Frankenstein monster made for our times.

And finally, I suppose there’s no way to get through this weekend without mentioning the Academy Awards. While I reviewed 12 Years A Slave a while back, Matthew Becklo over at Aleteia has a piece up explaining why the film should, and probably will, earn the Oscar for Best Picture.

See you next time.

PULP CATHOLICISM #057

CUTAWAYS: ULYSSES AGAINST THE SON OF HERCULES

It looks like The Lego Movie will continue to dominate the box office this weekend, but if you’ve already seen that and are looking for something new, there’s always Pompeii which I reviewed for Aleteia this week. It’s a pretty average sword and sandal flick, probably not something you’ll want to pay full price to see. Maybe part of the movie’s problem (beyond the horrible script, I mean) is that we’ve seen this kind of total destruction played out again and again on screens over the past few years. Hollywood needs to figure out audiences want a little more than just seeing another CGI city get wrecked.

What they really needed to do was take a look at all those old peplum flicks from Italy to see how to do this kind of thing the right way. Most all of those movies had awful scripts too, but they made up for it by managing to give you something memorable each time around. Mole men, vampires, rubber monsters… heck, even Zorro inexplicably showed up in one film. You could always count on a peplum to give you something weird. Take this moment from Ulysses Against the Son of Hercules, for example. I can’t think of anything from Pompeii that sticks in my mind the way this one of a kind cinematic moment does…

For me, it’s the expressions on the faces of the leads that really make the scene. It almost looks like nobody told the two leads what was going to happen before they started filming, so when the chicken people show up, they don’t have a clue as to what they’re supposed to do. It also kind of reminds me of the expressions a lot of us here in the States get whenever we see liturgical dancing.

Ah, good ole liturgical dancing. We make fun of it a lot around these parts because, well, it’s liturgical dancing. But aside from the mostly well intentioned, but undeniably cringe-inducing goofiness of the activity (your opinion may vary), there’s also the fact that the 1975 document published by the Vatican's Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship entitled Dance in the Liturgy declared most, if not all, liturgical dancing to be inappropriate for masses in the West. The document states…

“Here dancing is tied with love, with diversion, with profaneness, with unbridling of the senses… For that reason it cannot be introduced into liturgical celebrations of any kind whatever: That would be to inject into the liturgy one of the most desacralized and desacralizing elements, and so it would be equivalent to creating an atmosphere of profaneness which would easily recall to those present and to the participants in the celebration worldly places and situations… Neither can acceptance be had of the proposal to introduce into the liturgy the so-called artistic ballet because there would be presentation here also of a spectacle at which [only] one would assist, while in the liturgy one of the norms from which one cannot prescind is that of participation [by all].”

Basically, because dancing in the West is typically a hey-look-at-me kind of personal expression rather than a communal act of worship by a congregation, the Church says it shouldn’t be allowed during the mass where the focus should be on God only. Now the same document does also acknowledge certain forms of “rhythmic swaying and dance movements on the part of the participants” among some peoples as entirely appropriate due to their religious cultural heritage, but the exceptions are generally relegated to those in Africa and Asia (i.e. the Ethiopian rite).

So, if you’ve just got to dance before the Lord, that’s fine, but instead of trying to shoehorn it into the mass, why not do it the way King David did, stripped down to his ceremonial underwear OUTSIDE the sanctuary. The Church is perfectly fine with that.

PULP CATHOLICISM #056

SHORT FEATURE: LEGO HELLRAISER

By now I would imagine that most of you, along with just about everyone else in the world, have seen The Lego Movie. So, with a potential readership equal to the population of the Earth, naturally I was asked to review The Lego Movie for Aleteia.

Now, if you have seen the film, then you know one of the best things about it is all of the cameos by some very recognizable licensed characters. I mean, really, where else are you going to see the likes of Gandalf, Wonder Woman, and Shaquille O'Neal having a conversation? Well, except for maybe that dream you had once which you swore never to tell anyone about, but other than that? However, since The Lego Movie is an all ages affair, there’s still some characters they couldn’t include. Don’t fret though, that’s what YouTube is for…

Ah, Hellraiser. Now there’s a film that’ll always have a soft spot in my heart because it’s the first movie my wife and I ever saw together. What? It was the first one? How could we ever have imagined  the countless wretched sequels that lay in store? Have you seen any of the later ones? Well, I have and let me tell you, the depiction of Hell in those movies may not be very accurate, but the experience of sitting through something like Hellraiser: Revelations has got to be akin to receiving a small taste of Purgatory.

Actually, the Bible itself skimps a little when it comes to describing Hell. Basically it compares it to burning in a fire and says you’ll be miserable for eternity if you end up there. Some later Saints, though, had visions with a bit more detail to them. St. Faustina (of the Chaplet of Divine Mercy fame), for example, wrote in her diary of a particularly vivid impression of Hell she received in a private revelation.

"Today, I was led by an angel to the Chasms of Hell. It is a place of great torture; how awesomely large and extensive it is! The kinds of tortures I saw: The First Torture that constitutes hell is: The loss of God. The Second is: Perpetual remorse of conscience. The Third is that one's condition will never change. The Fourth is: The fire that will penetrate the soul without destroying it. A terrible suffering since it is a purely spiritual fire, lit by God's anger. The Fifth Torture is: Continual darkness and a terrible suffocating smell, and despite the darkness, the devils and the souls of the damned see each other and all the evil, both of others and their own. The Sixth Torture is: The constant company of Satan. The Seventh Torture is: Horrible despair, hatred of God, vile words, curses and blasphemies. These are the Tortures suffered by all the damned together, but that is not the end of the sufferings. There are special Tortures destined for particular souls. These are the torments of the senses. Each soul undergoes terrible and indescribable sufferings related to the manner in which it has sinned. There are caverns and pits of torture where one form of agony differs from another. I would have died at the very sight of these tortures if the omnipotence of God had not supported me.”

So, yeah, not exactly the fun-filled fetishist holiday depicted in the Hellraiser films.

Now, as the Catechism points out, “Throughout the ages, there have been so-called ‘private’ revelations, some of which have been recognized by the authority of the Church. They do not belong, however, to the deposit of faith. It is not their role to improve or complete Christ's definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history. Guided by the Magisterium of the Church, the sensus fidelium knows how to discern and welcome in these revelations whatever constitutes an authentic call of Christ or his saints to the Church.”

All of which means we’re not required to take St. Faustina’s word that Hell is as she described. But 100% accurate or not, it’s still a vision worth contemplating if it helps us imagine what an eternity separated from God must be like. Plus, it’s got 100% less bondage gear than Hellraiser, so it’s got that going for it.

WEEKLY NEWSREEL

Good evening Mr. & Mrs. Catholic, and all you other Christians at sea, welcome to the latest edition of the Newsreel. This week, science goes to the movies. Now off to press.

DATELINE: ROCHESTER – Researchers at the University of Rochester have “found that couples who watched and talked about issues raised in movies like Steel Magnolias and Love Story were less likely to divorce or separate than couples in a control group. Surprisingly, the ‘Love Story’ intervention was as effective at keeping couples together as two intensive therapist-led methods.” They also found that “falling in love” movies like Sleepless in Seattle or When Harry Met Sally were not as effective at encouraging dialog as movies depicting rocky relationships like Love and Other Drugs and She’s Having a Baby. So if you’d like to get a head start on the sharing before you and your significant other get to that next Catholic marriage retreat, why not pop a chick flick into the DVD player and get things going.

DATELINE: DENMARK – Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark, and apparently it’s the math. Remember the running gag in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in which the coin flipped by Guildenstern (or maybe it was Rosencrantz) always lands on heads, even after 76 tries. Well, Evelyn Lamb, Ph.D. at Scientific American has run the numbers and decided that you would have to flip a coin at least 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times to expect a run in which you get that many consecutive heads. In other words, Guildenstern’s feat is statistically improbable. Of course, Guildenstern himself had some non-mathematical guesses as to what was going on including time being frozen, some kind of purgatorial punishment, or maybe just plain old miraculous divine intervention. Now the Catechism reminds us that miracles “are the most certain signs of divine Revelation, adapted to the intelligence of all; they are ‘motives of credibility’ (motiva credibilitatis), which show that the assent of faith is ‘by no means a blind impulse of the mind’.” In short, they are occurrences which help the rational mind accept a reality which it cannot otherwise see. Given that, would 76 consecutive heads be enough to do that for you?

DATELINE: SCOTLAND/BRAZIL – We all know how hard it is for Catholics to find a movie in which they are depicted in a good light, but did you know that piranha have the same problem? That’s right, despite their voracious people eating behavior as depicted on the big screen, studies conducted by the University of St Andrews, Scotland and Brazil’s Mamirauá Institute would seem to indicate that piranha aren’t that bad after all. “The truth is that the majority of species of piranha (there are more than thirty) are vegetarian. Even the so-called ‘carnivorous’ types (including Pygocentrus spp.) are at best omnivorous, consuming a wide and varied diet, with a ‘meat’ component consisting of insects and small fish rather than cows and people.” And although rare attacks on humans by schools of piranha do occur, the data suggests that the real reason piranha hang around in large groups is not so they can quickly strip all the flesh off a person’s bones, but rather because it’s better protection against predators. In other words, the poor little killing machines huddle together because they’re scared of bigger killing machines. So now we know the truth. As Amy Deacon, PhD., puts it, “Science is at its most exciting and important when it can challenge deeply engrained public perceptions with facts – but it is the responsibility of scientists to convey this information more effectively than Hollywood’s sensationalized versions, and that is quite a public engagement task!” Indeed, we Catholics understand the dilemma all too well.

And with that, we’ll leave you, as always, with the immortal words of the great Les Nessman. Good evening, and may the good news be yours.

PULP CATHOLICISM #055

THE B-LIST: 5 MOVIE SPORTS THAT PROBABLY WON’T MAKE IT INTO THE OLYMPICS

Watching snowboarders go sailing almost a football field’s length into the air or skeleton riders shoot face first down a mountain at speeds approaching 90 mph, it’s easy to question whether or not these athletes are, in fact, out of their minds. But as insane as some of the events seem, there are some sports from the movies that are so crazed that we’ll probably never get to see them show up in the Olympics.

DEATH RACING from DEATH RACE 2000

While auto racing was introduced as an exhibition sport at the 1900 Olympics, it never made the cut as an official event because in many people’s eyes the outcome of a car race relies on the quality of the equipment rather than the physical capabilities of the driver. But in Death Racing, in which points are scored by how many pedestrians you can mow down with your vehicle, I’d imagine steering ability probably matters much more than speed. If you think of it as Luge with a body count, it might just work. It’d probably be hard to sell tickets to spectators, though, so I doubt we’ll ever see this one get added.

ROLLERBALL from ROLLERBALL

C’mon, a mish-mash of roller derby, motocross, basketball, and ultimate fighting, what more could you ask for? It was even designed to be an international competition. Of course, the sport’s anti-corporate undertones probably wouldn’t sit well with the sponsors, so Rollerball is probably out. After all, we can’t have everybody rising up against their McNugget overlords, can we?

GYMKATA from GYMKATA

Gymnastics is one of the biggest television draws for the Olympics, so you’d think the organizers would jump at the chance to add another related event to the proceedings. Really, Gymkata is just the regular men’s competition with the extra added attraction of the athletes punching and kicking anyone who gets too close to the apparatuses. I bet it would probably prove so popular that it could spawn a bunch of spin-offs like Downhill Boxing, Full Contact Curling, or maybe even Skate-Fu. Unfortunately, the judging in gymnastics is already too subjective, so who would really want to watch an event where the contestants could get penalized for not breaking someone’s nose artistically enough?

ROBOT BOXING from STAR ODYSSEY

With Google quickly on its way to becoming SkyNet, this one seems like a no-brainer. Artificial intelligences are bound to want to get in on the sports action at some point, and who doesn’t feel like punching a machine in the face whenever the ATM is down or that talking gas pump tries to sell you some engine cleaner for the millionth time? Still, until they come up with a program that makes a robot get tired and want to hang all over his opponent in the middle of the ring like a drunken prom date, this one probably isn’t going to be allowed.

JUGGING from THE BLOOD OF HEROES

The object in Jugging is simple. Someone on your team has to get a dog skull across the opposing team’s goal line without sustaining serious bodily harm from the defenders wielding clubs, pipes, and spiked chains. Pretty cool, huh? But what really makes Jugging stand out from some of the other games in this list is that it actually became a real world sport a while back after a group of Germans started their very own Jugging league. Theoretically, that means Jugging is the one sport on this list that has the potential to become an Olympic event some day. Considering the high rate of broken limbs and fractured skulls involved in Jugging, however, I just don’t see that happening any time soon.

Oh well, maybe the movies will come up with a sport we can actually add to the Olympics one day. As long as whatever it turns out to be follows the advice of the Catechism and “rejects a neo-pagan notion that tends to promote the cult of the body, to sacrifice everything for its sake, to idolize physical perfection and success at sports”, it should be fine. Otherwise, “by its selective preference of the strong over the weak, such a conception can lead to the perversion of human relationships.” And we don’t won’t that, do we?

Still, you’ve gotta admit, Skate-Fu sounds pretty cool.

NOW SHOWING AT A BLOG NEAR YOU

This week for Aleteia I reviewed The Monuments Men, a disappointing take on what is actually a really interesting true story. Oh well, they can’t all be Academy Award material, I suppose. Speaking of which, if you’re sick of hearing about the Oscars already and just want them to be over, well, blame us Catholics, because we’re partly the reason they exist in the first place.

I have to admit, even though a lot of the movies aren’t classics, I’ve been having a blast with my reviewing gig at Aleteia (free movies will do that for you). Still, I can’t help but notice I’m often at odds with my fellow Catholic movie critics (and by “fellow” I mean that I read them and they don’t know I exist) over which films are good or not. In fact, given how many times we disagree, I’m afraid I might one day get labeled as the Anti-Greydanus if things keep up. That being the case, I was surprised to find that, much like myself, Disney’s Frozen left Mr. Greydanus a little, ahem, cold. I was also amused how, on a second viewing, he found the movie to be completely gay.

Meanwhile, over at The Good, The True, and The Beautiful, Daniel Collins talks about a recent trend in entertainment that isn’t exactly gay, but more, shall we say, emasculating. He discusses why he believes modern vampire tales, ahem, suck, and why they need the Church to make them better again.

Of course, if you’re going to get the Church involved, you’d better be careful not to let anything too dicey slip into your story. You see, although advocates for “mature” Christian fiction argue that the Bible is full of sex and violence, so it’s okay for their Christian fiction to do so as well,  R. L. Copple from Speculative Fiction puts forth his own argument that the Bible may not be as R-rated as they believe.

For some writers, however, standards really aren’t that big of a problem. Take the folks who write stuff like Shaknado, for instance. The A.V. Club interviews Asylum writer Jose Prendes about just what goes into churning out scripts for movies like Mega Shark. Hint: you get script notes from the producers demanding stuff like having a giant fish destroy the Sphinx.

Who knows, maybe the Asylum guys are just tired of riddles. If that’s the case, I suppose they’ll be happy to hear that Joe Wetterling from The Baptized Imagination believes he may have the solution to the age old question, “Why didn't the eagles just fly Frodo right to Mount Doom?”

And finally, just for the fun of it, head on over to Becoming Godzilla where you can learn to make your very own wearable version of the Big G. Amaze your friends, astound your enemies, take ten years off Tokyo’s life!

See you next time.

PULP CATHOLICISM #054

BMC MOVIE OF THE WEEK: THE GOLDEN CHILD

“Eddie Murphy followed up his Beverly Hills Cop success with this fantasy adventure that plops him right into the land of Ray Harryhausen and Indiana Jones. The plot revolves around a God-like youngster (J.L. Reate) known as a "golden child," who has been sent to Tibet to bring the gift of compassion to humanity. But the devil isn't idle, sending his emissary, Sardo Numspa (Charles Dance) to kidnap the golden child. Sardo absconds with the child and takes off to Los Angeles. In L.A., a beautiful Tibetan priestess named Kee Nang (Charlotte Lewis) seeks out Chandler Jarrell (Eddie Murphy), a social worker and self-styled "finder of lost children." She tells Chandler he has been chosen to rescue the magical child from the devil and save the world from evil. Before Chandler can let go of his first riposte, he finds himself holding a magic dagger, following a sacred parakeet, and under-going several trials by fire. He also falls in love with Kee Nang, who at one point in the film has to be brought back from the dead.” ~ Rovi’s All-Movie Guide

February 2, 2014: Feast of the Presentation of the Lord (Year A)

In 1984, Eddie Murphy starred in a little movie called Beverly Hills Cop. Made for $12,000,000, Murphy’s first solo venture went on to make around $235,000,000 domestically, over fifteen times its production budget. Admittedly, that’s a pretty tough act to follow. So when The Golden Child came out in 1986 and only made a meager three to four times its cost, it was immediately declared by the studios to be a major disappointment (yeah, I know, the recent Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug only broke even domestically, but hey, people have their expectations). On top of the box office numbers, the critics (with the inexplicable exception of Roger Ebert) were merciless, tossing around terms like half-baked, contrived, and (one of my favorites) indefensible rubbish. By almost everyone’s standards, The Golden Child was deemed a failure.

Everyone, that is, except for the audiences who were rolling around in the aisles laughing (not really recommended given the condition of most theater floors). Oh sure, they may not have come back to see The Golden Child a third or fourth time the way they did with Beverly Hills Cop, but for that single evening they were sitting in front of the screen, they loved it. All credit for that has to go to Eddie Murphy, of course. I know it’s hard to believe with films like Norbit and The Adventures of Pluto Nash stinking up the cineplexes these days, but there was once a fabled time when watching Eddie Murphy was like getting a master class in comedy. And that’s a fortunate thing for The Golden Child because, other than Murphy, the only other worthwhile things the flick has to offer are a couple of scenes featuring the irreplaceable Victor Wong (Egg Shen from Big Trouble In Little China) and a few instances of lovable, yet unmistakably second rate stop motion animation. The rest… not so good.

Rumor has it The Golden Child was originally conceived as an action vehicle for Mel Gibson, and you can tell. The film has all the standard trappings of a typical 1980s action movie. There’s biker gangs and ninjas and Randall 'Tex' Cobb and Heart’s Anne Wilson singing a radio ready rock anthem over the opening credits. It’s very easy to picture a pre-Lethal Weapon Mel running around Tibet and making quips as he picks off bad guys. But when Gibson passed on the project, the decision was made to bring in Murphy and rewrite the thing as a comedy. Which would be fine, except what’s on screen doesn’t seem like they rewrote too much at all. Sure, whenever Eddie’s in a scene ad-libbing it’s funny, but in all the one’s in which he’s a no-show, everybody is way too serious, almost as if no one but the main character's lines were actually changed from the original script. The end result is that the whole thing feels like Eddie Murphy walked onto a set where a bunch of strangers were filming a sub-par 1980s Temple Of Doom rip-off and just started ragging on everybody.

And really, that kind of makes it all the more funny, not to mention infinitely more quotable. Yeah, The Golden Child is another one of those 80s movies where you and your friends watch it, and then spend the next thirty years or so tossing lines from it back and forth. You can no longer greet each other normally, but instead have to grab each other in a bear hug exclaiming, “My dear sweet brother, Numsie!” Whenever you accidentally startle somebody, instead of apologizing, you just assure them, “"Its alright… I just want some chips." And you can never again just politely ask someone to pass you some silverware, you have to rap, “I–uh-I-uh-I want the knife!” Of course, it only works if you do it in your best Eddie Murphy impression, because that’s also the only way it works in the movie. Minus Murphy’s delivery, none of those quotes are actually funny.

In a way, I suppose that makes the real life Eddie Murphy somewhat analogous to his character in The Golden Child. They’re both the “chosen one” who saves the day; movie Murphy rescues the bald headed boy (who for some inexplicable reason is played by a girl) and helps usher in an age of… it’s actually not very clear, an age of not-hell I suppose, while real life Eddie rescues a bunch of 1980s bit players from getting stuck in movie hell, because if he hadn’t signed on the film would have probably ended up starring Michael Dudikoff or Don “The Dragon” Wilson. Of course, if such a thing had happened people would’ve still watched the movie and laughed, just not because they were supposed to. Let’s face it, not everyone’s cut out to be a chosen one.

Now if you just have to have a whole bunch of chosen ones, then the Bible has more than its fair share, although it usually refers to them as ‘anointed’ rather than ‘chosen’. As the Catechism explains, “In effect, in Israel those consecrated to God for a mission that he gave were anointed in his name. This was the case for kings, for priests and, in rare instances, for prophets.” So, in that sense, folks like Aaron and Saul and David were chosen ones singled out to fulfill certain tasks for God. And once the prophets showed up, they started hinting around (as Malachi does in this week’s first reading) about a special chosen one who would be anointed above his peers and bring salvation to God’s people. Now obviously we Christians believe that big chosen one turned out to be Jesus the Christ. That’s right, “the Christ.” A lot of folks these days forget that was a title, not his last name. “The word ‘Christ’ comes from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Messiah, which means ‘anointed’. It became the name proper to Jesus only because he accomplished perfectly the divine mission that ‘Christ’ signifies.”

This weeks readings are part of the Feast Day of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, one of those instances in the Gospels where people recognized Jesus as the Christ. But even though the day is all about him, like almost everything in his life, Jesus makes his anointing participatory. As the Catechism explains it, “Jesus is Christ, "anointed," because the Spirit is his anointing, and everything that occurs from the Incarnation on derives from this fullness. When Christ is finally glorified, he can in turn send the Spirit from his place with the Father to those who believe in him: he communicates to them his glory, that is, the Holy Spirit who glorifies him. From that time on, this joint mission will be manifested in the children adopted by the Father in the Body of his Son.”

Because we share in Jesus’ anointing, all believers become ‘priests’ in a certain sense. Of course, this ‘universal priesthood’ doesn’t mean we can all offer the Sacraments like the ministerial priesthood can (another post for another time). But hey, not everybody can be as funny as Eddie Murphy either. What we are ‘chosen’ to do in our priesthood is offer our bodies as a living sacrifice to God and to consecrate this crazy secular world through our work and our witness. That may not rate us a cool 80s rock anthem, but it ain’t too bad.