zagauk Reviews

Lilies (1996)

stunning and haunting

[9 April 2016]

Minor niggle - you wear a purple stole to heard confessions, not a white one.

However, this is one of the best films I have seen so far this year. The 'play within a play' like Hamlet makes for very interesting viewing as the back story unfolds.

Can anyone cast light on the continual lighting of matches? Or is it merely to 'cast light on the situation'?

And a question for someone clever - We know that the haunting and beautiful background music is by the Hilliard Ensemble and includes a Requiem mass and parts of Tenebrae - but what disc is it from? I have looked at their discography but can't fund it.

Angels in America (2003)

impressive but perhaps too glossy

[8/10 · 3 October 2014]

Having read and discussed the script two months ago, it was an eye-opener to see the play performed. Music, sound and visual effects make it come alive. The pace is slow so one can dwell on and think about the characters and themes in more depth. The visual effects are beautiful, though Kushner wanted a more 'rough theatre' – think Brecht, in the stage version – you should be able to see the wires holding up the angels.

Roy Cohn played by Al Pacino, was almost too slow. We imagined him to answer the phones more speedily and exhibit more charisma. In the film vision he is less a man of action and more ponderous and clingy.

Belize, the male nurse and drag queen appeared to me to be caring but frivolous. The film brings out his intelligent wit.

Prior Walker, likewise, comes across as a much deeper person than in the script. He is able to understand, very quickly, what is going on when his doctor updates his prognosis and he comes to terms with it in a sober way and more quickly that Louis.

However, we felt that we were not sure what we would have made of it had we not read the script beforehand.

Rock Haven (2007)

beautiful meditation

[9/10 · 18 September 2013]

I liked the twofold symbolism of the waves: of baptismal cleansing and as a reminder that 'Time's ever rolling stream bears all its sons away.' While some might think this film is ponderously slow, I reckon it's very meditative. When you're that young, time moves very slowly – remember the long school and university vacations? Teenage angst exists the world over, including struggling with one's sexuality and an evangelical young man like Brady will be able to quote chapter and verse from the bible to condemn himself. That's where the pastor was weak. His quotation of two, vaguely relevant bible verses would not have been sufficient to convince him.

And who is this pastor, anyway? His church has cross and candles and the Stations of the Cross, which suggest a Roman Catholic building; not the sort of church Brady and his mother would attend as evangelicals (though their home has the tackiest reproduction of Da Vinci's Last Super that I have ever seen).

The place, Rock Haven, far from being a place of escape became a means of finding oneself, somewhat like a pilgrimage destination where you have to travel in order to arrive back at where you started.

Despite these minor niggles, this is a beautifully-produced film dealing with issues that are still live for many young people despite its being the Twenty-first century.

Mysterious Skin (2004)

Absorbing rather than harrowing

[16 August 2011]

This film is very faithful to the book. It portrays slowly recovering memory of trauma by fracturing it among the different characters, particularly the geek and the streetwise kid who later becomes a rent boy, of whom it is said, 'Where normal people have a heart, he has an enormous black hole.' (Though subsequent life events reveal his vulnerability.) The subject matter is such that many people would find this film harrowing but I thought the film was, if not 'entertaining' absorbing.

I shall never see folk who believe in UFOs or in devils in quite the same way again. What awful experience have they undergone that makes them believe so irrationally? The child actors who play the two main characters as eight-year-olds, match up very well as they look like the older actors at age eighteen.

The paedophile coach is portrayed not as a monster but as an immature adult and there is a telling juxtaposition, during the final scene, as the innocence of the Christmas carol 'Silent night…….holy infant tender and mild' sung outside contrasts with the recollection of innocence violated and stolen inside.

Monk Dawson (1998)

Good story

[14 August 2011]

Gentle story of two friends, over several years, who betray but forgive each other. One, who becomes a Roman Catholic priest, has a teenage crush on the other. The public school solution is to cane it out of him.

The RC priest supposedly loses his faith, but as an older priest says, it is the Church that has lost him because his radical and challenging views upset the hierarchy.

The monastery on an island is a little bleak. I almost expected a butler, bent-double, to appear at the door and say, 'You rang?' I wish they had hired some sort of religious consultant – it was tiresome to see the same green set of vestments worn back to front while the monks wore the wrong combination of tat.

The 'twist' at the end is reminiscent of The Thorn Birds.

The Believer (2001)

A meditation on Jewish Theology

[9/10 · 21 March 2002]

Nobody has yet commented on the theology of this film. There is the seeming arbitrariness of God's commands - from not mixing milk and meat to sacrificing your son. When Jews study torah, they do so in pairs, since theology is about argument and questioning.

Danny starts off as a model Jew - not because he obeys, but because he questions, like Job. However, like many educational systems, his teacher cannot cope with his questioning. Religions need their critics on the inside, challenging the tradition, instead of leaving it to mediocrity after its best minds have gone.

It's almost as if Danny still fervently believes - he still reverences the torah scrolls - and wants to shout louder so that the tradition will listen to him. He trashes the synagogue like children trash their rooms when parents don't listen. As a child he had challenged God to strike him dead; a challenge he will make at the end and, if there is no answer, he will bring about himself.

The film is a meditation on the Abraham and Isaac story. The Jewish man, his son and the Nazi with the bayonet is a modern replay of it. Danny meditates, almost in Ignatian Christian terms (where someone imagines themselves into a biblical story and explores it from different angles, role-playing the different people in it.) In the story, great play is made on Abraham being made to take, 'Your son, your only son, whom you love.' Christians have seen that as a type/paradigm of Jesus - God's only son. Danny comments on the success of that self-sacrifice enabling Jesus to become God. So Danny decides to be another sacrifice in his quest for divinity - but will it work? The story ends with him being told 'There is nothing up there,' echoing the debates as to whether God is dead or never existed, a debate which has been on many Jewish (and Christian) lips since the Holocaust.