Tag: Christian

A Hidden Life

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Opening with and periodically punctuated by documentary footage of Hitler and the Third Reich, this is Malick’s retelling of the wartime life experience of a real life couple. Deeply in love, Franz and Fani Jägerstätter (August Diehl and Valerie Pachner) run their farm near a remote, mountainous Austrian country village. With the Third Reich on the ascendant, he gets called up for military service and is billeted in a nearby castle and trained while she, the kids (three girls) and her sister Resie (Maria Simon) struggle to manage the farm without him.

When France surrenders, many men are released from national service and Franz is allowed to go back to farm, wife and family. However it’s only a matter of time before he’s called up again. And this time, the only way out of signing the oath is to go to prison.

Other hands might have turned the real life history on which this is based into a pedestrian movie that wouldn’t do any favours to the memory of those involved. Malick, however, uses the couple’s written correspondence when the husband is away as the spine of his narrative so that when he hangs his images and sounds upon it, they add something to a solid story that already makes sense in its own right.

So he starts off with fields and mountains and a couple very much in love, intermittently throwing in images of family life and agriculture before showing us life in army barracks then prison. Although the whole runs the best part of three hours, it never feels like it, more like a very slow paced, leisurely 90 minutes in which time sometimes seems to stand still and the film’s content slowly seeps into the viewer.

That content is, to express it at its simplest, what are you supposed to do in society when bad people are in charge? Franz wrestles with the Christian injunction to be subject to the governing authorities but at the same time to resist evil. First friends then acquaintances and finally judges tell him how much simpler his life would be if he only signed the oath to Hitler. His devastating response is that, if he doesn’t sign, he is free. A challenge to us all, especially if we find our society asking us to comply with ideas or actions which run counter to our conscience.

In retelling this story on the screen in the way that he has, Malick brilliantly expresses the numinous good and the fact that some ideas or values are so important that everything else must take second place to them, even if it means going against what most people think. This is a profoundly moving experience on a very deep spiritual level, rare in cinema. It’ll be a long time before we see another film with the same theological depth that speaks so eloquently to the problem of human suffering as this one does.

A Hidden Life is out in the UK on Friday, January 17th. Watch the film trailer below:

Little Monsters

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

There are certain elements which, on paper, ought never to be in the same movie. For example, if your movie features kindergarten children centre stage, you probably ought not to have a death metal musician, bad language, violent video games, flesh-eating zombies, couples having sex, sex addition or relationship breakdown. Incredibly, Australian effort Little Monsters has all of these. Rather more incredibly, it not only works but is one of the funniest comedies of the year. The sort of film critics file under ‘guilty pleasures’.

It opens with an arresting montage of a couple shouting vociferously at each other in a variety of scenarios. Sara (Nadia Townsend) wants kids. Dave (Alexander England) doesn’t – he just wants to play his Flying V with his stadium rock / death metal band God’s Sledgehammer, a goal thwarted somewhat by the fact that the band actually broke up six years ago when the other members left. “Is that a Christian band?”, asks kindergarten teacher and Christian Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong’o) who Dave fancies. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

Dave seeks refuge at the home of his sister Tess (Kat Stewart) and her small son Felix (the winsome Diesel La Torraca) where he quickly gets into trouble for using Bad Words, introducing the boy to violent video games with zombies and complaining about the tiny size of their home delivered pizzas. Oh, and getting Felix to dress up as Darth Vader and barge into Sara’s flat in an attempt to propose to her, another goal thwarted, this time by the fact that she’s having sex with someone else when Dave and the diminutive Darth burst in.

Told he must both clean up his act and pull his weight if he’s to stay with Tess and Felix, Dave takes Felix to kindergarten class where he is immediately smitten by the childrens’ aforementioned and beloved teacher Miss Caroline and volunteers to help her on the upcoming school trip to community farm Pleasant Valley. However the course of true love never did run smooth: Pleasant Valley is situated next to a US military research facility from which a horde of flesh-eating zombies are in the process of escaping.

The narrative brilliantly conveys a simple child’s view of the world so that all the things that happen to Felix and his classmates, no matter how seemingly inappropriate, are just a game. Miss Caroline looks after her charges by keeping their minds occupied via simple rhyme-based rituals (“one two three, eyes on me!”) and making sure that no matter how strange or bizarre the world may appear, it’s okay because adults are in charge and will always keep them safe.

This is the world of Felix’s favourite childrens’ TV star Teddy McGiggle (Josh Gad) who, as it happens, is at Pleasant Valley with his cameraman on this particular day. And who turns out in real life, contrary to his child-friendly star persona, to be a self-obsessed, foul mouthed sex addict who’d rather lock himself inside the one safe building on site than risk his neck to allow a crowd of (possibly infected) pre-school children to share the safety of that space and survive the hordes of zombies. It’s only thanks to Dave’s ingenuity that Dave, Miss Caroline and the kids are able to get into the locked gift shop inside which McGiggle has locked himself.

At the centre of this film, once it reaches the kindergarten class at the end of the first reel, is Lupita Nyong’o who gives everything to the part of Miss Caroline and is clearly having a great deal of fun with both the role and her co-stars, especially the small kids. She starts out in a bright yellow dress, later to be covered in dried gore which she explains to the children as, “I got into a jam fight”. She amuses the kids by singing them Taylor Swift songs accompanied by her ukulele. To give you a relief from the action, the singing and the zombies, Dave, Teddy and Miss Caroline all get one on one scenes in which they confide to someone else about their chequered pasts which makes you want to spend more time in their company (except possibly in that of the disreputable MgGiggle). Bring the pair of them back for a sequel?

Where the film really scores is when its preschool hero bursts through a crowd a zombies in his Darth Vader costume to rescue Dave with a tractor and trailer which he knows how to drive because he’s obsessed with tractors, pausing to pet a small lamb in an enclosure on the way. Most of the time, the film keeps going on sheer energy and originality, only to lose a little of that in a finale where troops turn up and, falling back on zombie film cliché, open fire on the zombies after Miss Caroline, Dave and the kids have already got them under control, at least to a degree, by singing children’s songs such as ‘if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands’. However, that’s a minor carp in a film which, while it really oughtn’t to work, turns out to be one of the funniest things you’ll see on screen this year.

Little Monsters is out in the UK on Friday, November 15th. On VoD in March. Watch the red band trailer below:

1985

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Here’s a Christmas movie with a difference. It’s December 1985 and young New York ad agency man Adrian (Cory Michael Smith) flies home to Texas to see his family for the first time in several years. Tensions are immediately apparent between go-getter son and his blue-collar worker father Dale (Michael Chiklis) from the moment the latter picks him up from the airport. Once Adrian gets to the house, his devoted mother Eileen (Virginia Madsen) can’t stop fussing over him while his younger brother Andrew (Aidan Langford), in his early teens, is distant having never forgiven Adrian for leaving.

Each of the family members presents Adrian with a different challenge. Dad is horrified at his Christmas present of an expensive leather jacket while Adrian is slightly shocked to receive a brand new Bible. Mom encourages him to call up Carly (Jamie Chung), a girl with whom Adrian grew up who also left Texas and is likewise home for the holidays and who he hasn’t seen for years. Andrew quit the school football team for its drama society, which is giving him issues with the father who understands contact sports but doesn’t really get the arts.

Underneath all of this is the presence of the local conservative Christian church, briefly heard as dad sits listening to sermons on a Christian radio station and seen as a worship service which the family attend in Sunday best where Adrian struggles to sing the words of hymns which make him uneasy. Elsewhere, Adrian has an embarrassing encounter with former high school jock turned supermarket manager Mark (Ryan Piers Williams) who has become a Christian and apologises for his past treatment of Adrian, although the two clearly have nothing in common.

Adrian learns from Andrew that his younger brother’s Madonna music cassettes and Bryan Adams poster have been taken off him because the local pastor deems them ungodly. When Andrew discovers that his brother saw Madonna on tour, he suddenly has a new-found respect for him. As a covert Christmas present, Adrian gives him a $100 voucher for the local Sound Warehouse to replenish his audio cassette collection, admonishing Andrew to keep his purchases hidden.

Contacting Carly, Adrian is invited to see her do an impressive improv stand-up gig where she expresses “all the shit you daredn’t say in real life”. Following some time at a dance club, they go back to hers which ends badly when she comes on strong to him but he isn’t really interested. As he tells her, “I’ve had a shitty year.”

Shot in aesthetically pleasing black and white by Ten’s cameraman and co-screenwriter Hutch, this boasts a strong script with deftly sketched characters and is beautifully cast and acted to boot. It completely understands its chosen time period of the mid-eighties, a time of LP records and portable music cassette players, before mobile phones and the internet existed. The film grasps very profound topics: the pain of the gay community being decimated by the AIDS virus in urban locations like New York and the deficiencies of Bible Belt Protestant fundamentalism in its inability to comfort those feeling that pain. And it grasps them without judgement of one side or another.

This is full of genuinely touching moments. Via an overheard conversation in another room, Adrian hears his mother tell his father he really ought to wear that leather jacket to work. Carly’s stand-up routine details her heartfelt experiences of racism as a Korean-American. And in a frank conversation with his mother, Adrian learns that she… well, you’ll have to see the film to find out.

Most people have experienced the joys and heartaches of spending time with their families at Christmas. While 1985 is set in the Christmas of that year, and some of its issues are specific to that date and time, there’s also much here that relates to wider human issues of family, how children deal with parents and siblings, how parents deal with children and how, sometimes, with the best intentions, that can all go horribly wrong. And can then sometimes, somehow, tentatively, in small steps, be at least partly put right.

A Christmas treat.

1985 is out in the UK on Thursday, December 20th, and then on VoD on Monday, December 24th. Watch the film trailer below:

Alive (Sanda)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Jung-chul (writer/director/star Park Jung-bum) is a foreman supervising workers who lives with various relatives and dependents in a house situated in isolated woodland. His sister Soo-yun (Lee Seung-yeon) is mentally ill, given to bouts of both initiating casual sex at the local bus station and recriminatory self-flagellation in an isolated shack in the woods. Her husband has walked out and Jung-chul removes the front door from their house.

Jung-chul is given to sharp, often irrational, knee-jerk responses. Nevertheless, the couple’s daughter Hana (Shin Haet-bit) understandably looks to Jung-chul more than her unfit and unwell mother or her absent father. Also living in the house is essentially good-hearted and honest, if not very smart, Myung-hoon (Park Myung-hoon).

Meanwhile, the daughter of Jung-chul’s boss is about to get married to a wealthy suitor, and to fulfil the dowry the prospective in-laws suggest the boss buys an expensive, huge, state-of-the-art TV for the couple the cost of which will place a severe strain on his company’s finances.

That’s just the set up of an extraordinary, character-driven outing which runs for almost three hours. (At least, it did in the version shown at LKFF 2018, although the director claims he has a four and a half hour cut too.). On one level the pace is slow and things take a long time to happen, but the seemingly languorous pace is deceptive because writer-director/star Park packs in a lot in the course of 175 minutes. Early on, for instance, a trusted colleague of Jung-chul’s is given money by him to pay wages to subordinate members of the workforce, but runs off with the money leaving Jung-chul to stop the unpaid workers stealing company equipment to sell it off to get what they’re owed.

From the early flagellation sequence, with its echoes of some of the more austere forms of Christian piety, there’s a suggestion that, as in Park’s earlier The Journals Of Musan (2010), religion is once again going to play a significant role. Sure enough, there’s a whole subplot about Jung-chul making sure Hana attends church, even though he doesn’t go himself. In the pew, she prays fervently for her mother’s health and the family’s other needs, but when things get too much she runs away from home and robs the collection box at the back of the church in order to survive.

A further plot element involves a production process using soybeans, one in which temperature is critical. A window in the fairly primitive manufacturing facility is left open, causing the temperature to drop and the pressed cuboid shapes of soybean to develop a nasty black mould and a tendency to crumble, rendering the entire crop useless after months of backbreaking, labour intensive work. Coupled with the financial strain of the boss’ commitment to buy the expensive television for his daughter’s dowry this spells disaster for the company and, in turn, the workforce. But who was responsible for leaving the window open when it was supposed to have been shut?

As the narrative proceeds, it seems like one bad thing after another happens to Jung-chul and his nearest and dearest, as if fate – or God – has it in for him, and those around him. Or perhaps, as in the case of the boss agreeing to commit money to the expensive TV he can’t afford, Jung-chul’s swiftness to anger when things go wrong or various other bad decisions some of the the characters make, which we won’t reveal here, the fault lies at least in part with many of the protagonists’ independent actions or the responses to the situations in which they find themselves. Either way, rural life as portrayed here is a harsh existence with plenty of pitfalls for anyone choosing even momentarily the wrong path. As with the director’s earlier film, it’s a remarkable and compelling work that deserves a wider airing than the festival circuit.

Alive plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival. Watch the film trailer (Korean only, sadly) below:

The Journals Of Musan (Musanilgi)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Jeon Seung-chul (writer-director Park Jung-bum) is a defector from Musan, North Korea trying to survive in the social underbelly of Seoul, South Korea. He has a badly paid makeshift job putting up fly-posters, operating on the fringes of the law. He dresses cheaply and is in need of a haircut.

He lives in the apartment of Kyung-chul (Jin Yon-guk), who occasionally brings women back for sex. His landlord has no scruples about shoplifting and also runs a lucrative scam in which other North Koreans give him money to send to North Korea.

Seung-chul reads his Bible in his room while listening to Christian worship music. He puts up with his flatmate’s pickups but draws the line when Kyung-chul takes him to a department store and steals a pair of trousers which Seung-chul wants. Seung-chul returns the pilfered item. He later alienates Kyung-chul by bringing a stray puppy home.

He attends a medium-sized Christian church on Sundays complete with pastor, robed choir and free after service meals. But he doesn’t know anyone there. The church fails the Biblical admonition that believers should welcome strangers into their midst because no-one there ever sits with Seung-chul or talks to him.

He likes a girl in the choir Young-sook (Kang Eun-jin) but she hasn’t noticed him and he can’t bring himself to talk to her. Stalking her, he learns she works running a sleazy karaoke bar where there’s a job vacancy. The twin prospect of more work and getting to know Young-sook better propel him to apply for and get the job.

The one person who appear to genuinely have Seung-chul’s best interests at heart is a cop, Detective Park (Park Young-dong), who tries to help him find better paying and more secure work. But it’s hard because Seung-chul’s ID number identities him as North Korean so no-one wants to employ him.

Shot in highly effective, long takes that really make you feel like you’re in its protagonist’s shoes, this is a slow yet compelling piece that really gets under your skin and marks out its director/ writer/ actor as a unique and articulate voice.

The film portrays a precarious existence. Various elements in Seung-chul’s insecure way of living threaten to collapse around him one by one. His fly-posting boss (Seo Jin-won) thinks his work is substandard and two thugs repeatedly beat him up for working on their turf. He falls foul of Young-sook when she finds him karaokeing to Christian choruses with the club hostesses. Then Kyung-chul’s scam unravels and the two men find themselves relentlessly pursued by three North Koreans he’s defrauded.

Made on a shoestring and breaking numerous conventions, this extraordinary independent movie is like a breath of fresh air. That’s perhaps because first-time director Park is working out how to shoot a feature as he goes along. Although things happen later on which to some extent redeem the way society and church characters here deal with the underclass, this is a searing indictment of their attitudes to some of Korea’s most vulnerable people.

Park’s second feature, the three hour long Alive (2014), plays in the LKFF on Tuesday. If it’s anywhere like as good as this debut, audiences are in for a treat.

The Journals Of Musan plays in the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF). Watch the film trailer below:

And here’s the trailer(Korean, no subtitles) for his follow up film Alive – showing in the LKFF Tuesday, November 13th:

Tickets here.