SpeakingTruth.org user: Comrade Kevin

Movie Review: Heavens Above!

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:17:13 -0700

John and Roy Boulting produced, wrote, and directed several of the finest British satires ever filmed. Incorporating clever social criticism, witty dialogue, and ever inventive premises, their films attracted top-notch talent--often the cream of the crop of UK cinema. Critically lauded and popular with audiences, the films of the Boulting Brothers proved time and time again that a modest budget was no roadblock to success. Like the Cohen Brothers that followed them, the Boultons used many of the same actors and actresses from film to film. Those who have seen two or three quickly pick up on the sight gags, running jokes, and director's trademarks that distinguish a Bolton Brothers movie from other movies of the period.

Heavens Above! was the third in a series of a ambitious trilogy which set its aim on major institutions in British society. The trilogy began with Private's Progress, a satire of the army, and was then followed by I'm All Right, Jack, which lampooned industry and trade unions. Heavens Above! is often considered to be the weakest of the three, largely the fault of its bizarre ending, which is silly, contrived, and altogether incongruous with the rest of the picture. It has been speculated that the Boultings simply ran out of ideas by its conclusion and couldn't come up with a suitable way of tying together loose ends. It's a real pity because the first hour and a half makes some remarkably philosophical, fully realized points that were obviously the product of much time and contemplation. Though the last few minutes render the film slightly flawed--one mustn't overlook the flashes of genius which are more applicable to today then they were forty-five years ago when the film was first shown to audiences.

While Heavens Above! was written primarily as a satire of the church, its screenplay incorporates some very blunt criticisms of materialism and consumer culture. A businessman, curtly dismisses the plea of a client who appeals to his sense of fairness and propriety. "There are no gentleman in business," he snaps. Even harsher are the wholesale condemnations of class conflict, congregational snootiness, and elitist attitudes. Vicar John Smallwood (Peter Sellers) upbraids his new parish, accusing them all of not being genuine Christians and living lives of spiritual flabbiness--totally unwilling to secure their own salvation in heaven due to their selfishness, laziness, and all around complacency. Through following the life of and the works of Smallwood, the focus of the film's most deliberately scathing commentary focuses squarely on the church itself for being just as asleep at the wheel and immobilized by inefficiency as its members. The Church of England's lethal combination of incompetent bureaucracy and marked hypocrisy constantly negates the very doctrinal mandates it preaches from the pulpit. The unassuming and unprepossessing Vicar Smallwood, by contrast, lives his life unashamed of what his superiors might think, speaks his mind no matter the consequences, and stands in great contrast as an example of a religious leader who walks the walk and talks the talk, too.

Though admirable in many ways, Smallwood's excessive piety and blind trust in the inherent goodness of mankind does lead him to make a major mistake. By taking into his pastoral residence a large, poor gypsy family used to making its living by unscrupulous means, Smallwood invites the scorn of his neighbors, influential members of his congregation, and his own superiors. The father of the family is a con artist, despised as little more than vermin by the locals, yet the Vicar's singular desire to reform the man's children, baptize the unconverted, and teach Christianity to the vulgar bunch of hooligans blinds him to the fact that they do not respect his hospitality, exploit his good nature, take every opportunity to steal, and run a variety of scams behind his back.

The idealistic Smallwood entices a rich widow in his parish to forsake her fortune for heavenly riches. Her substantial wealth is tied up in a company which manufactures a laxative advertised as a curative for all ills, which also happens to be the town's largest employer. After being accused by the vicar of caring more for the health of her earthly life than the status of her soul in the afterlife, the chastened woman decides to devote her share in the business to provide free food at market for all who would wish to have it. While at first the effort is perceived as an exercise in generosity, the combined efforts of the experiment in Christian charity drive the local grocery and butcher to the brink of bankruptcy. In addition, and with the purest of intentions, Vicar Smallwood uses a well-attended sermon as an opportunity to condemn the feel-good pill produced by the local factory as little more than a cheap replacement for the role of God in the daily lives of the populace. Smallwood's rhetoric becomes picked up by the press, distorted by hyperbole, and transformed into a major media sensation.

The resulting fallout causes the sales of the pill to drop dramatically, giving the company no other choice but to drastically reduce its workforce, laying off employees left and right. This in turn causes unemployment to rise as high as sixty percent in the town, giving rise to angry demonstrations in the street, a few choice bigoted remarks, and several open public displays of violence. Having no choice but to intervene, else this novel concept catch on across the country and bankrupt the entire nation, the British government insists that Vicar Smallwood be removed from his post and moved elsewhere. The widow ceases to furnish the good free of charge and the company is saved by a judicious name change.

The movie's most shocking declaration posits that if every person changed his or her lifestyle and in doing so underwent a religious conversion, living directly according to the purest wishes of Jesus Christ, the world would go broke. One can easily understand how genuine altruism combined with the demise of individual desire for profit and material gain could easily bankrupt the economic workings of the free market system if adopted wholesale. While the practice advanced by the rich woman is rooted upon the noblest of intentions, quickly the all-too-human tendency to take advantage of naive generosity rears its ugly head. A cautionary tale, Heavens Above! warns us the audience to be neither too trusting, nor too kind towards those who would take the selfless help of others and use it to serve their their own selfish gain.

I sincerely wish that Christian conservatives who advocate no separation whatsoever between the church and the state could see this film; incorporating religion into commerce proves to be an ruinous economic disaster. Those espousing a conception of Jesus as stodgy conservative fixture might do well to contemplate that the pure ideal of the religion they hold dear is, at its core, radically socialistic. Moreover, Heavens Above! argues that the role of religion for an individual is beneficial, but that if religion were adopted wholesale by everyone it would eviscerate the societal framework, plunging the entire planet into utter turmoil. The separate spheres of secular and religious in combination are not just deeply destructive, they are wholly incompatible with each other.

Crippled Inside

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 07:18:52 -0700

In my opinion, don't be afraid to go with yourself. The world will try to push and prod you in every direction it can. Reflect upon the inward light inside you--to that and that alone be true.

Movie Review: Nashville

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 07:38:28 -0700

Robert Altman's best films contain ironies and counter-ironies in such copious quantity that it's tough to know which in particular to cite. What's the most indicative example of them all--Sidney Chaplin's BBC reporter, Opel, thrusting her microphone and her pretentious opinions upon a world of artificiality, in a vain effort to discover the "real" Nashville? Or, is it instead best realized in Henry Gibson's Haven Hamilton, a fixture in the Nashville scene, too self-absorbed to realize he's about as well regarded around town as his ridiculously false toupee. Nothing could be simultaneously more or less real than this parallel universe of the superficial, the egocentric, and the self-serving.

Each character behaves in a coldly selfish fashion, and even the kindest gestures appear mutually parasitic in the end. Criticism of L.A. glitz and its culture of gorgeously inauthentic unreality would reach its ultimate conclusion two years later with Woody Allen's magnum opus, Annie Hall, but here is one of its first major public viewings.

The country music capital as allegory for the American political process is the best way to pull together all of these disparate elements into some coherent whole. At best, this is a means of pulling together a rough microcosm of fundamentally different people, linking the political world with the celebrity world, and as such it is the axis upon which the movie revolves. Altman's Nashville is a backwater Los Angeles, and its satirical, caustic eye goes easy on absolutely no one.

Quite unusually, while many Hollywood films extend the supreme cliche of a grotesquely farcical portrayal of the south, playing up the peculiarities of natives at the expense of their dignity, in watching Nashville, that overused cliche is thankfully nowhere to be found, so much so that it's easy to forget that this is a film set in that oft-lampooned region of the country.

It's a harsh film, played straight-faced and without the winking kind of grossly distorted caricature present in many satires, which amounts to letting the audience in on the joke and providing sure-fire laughs--as such it demands much from its audience. It's the sort of picture that may take a couple viewings and some background study to understand in totality, and even then it leaves many questions unanswered.

Nashville makes no attempt to stick to narrative conventions, instead trying to examine bits and pieces of the lives of no less than twenty-five characters in a little over two and a half hours of running time. The ultimate ensemble film, the audience never gets a chance to be bored, or, at first, totally engaged. Imagine a soap opera or a rapid-cutting miniseries which never makes promises to tie up loose ends or resolve plot devices. To put it bluntly, it takes a while to get into Altman's directorial world, and in particular to process the dialogue, which in the director's trademark fashion is peculiarly cross-streaming, flowing from one scene to another and often within individual scenes themselves. Yet, within this paradigm, linear time is strictly observed, as the events progress in real time, over the course of five consecutive days.

Nashville at times comes across as a parade of eccentrics spouting droll, dry-as-bones humor. One must accept the metanarrative that selfishness is the supreme drive of the human condition and that celebrity is utterly and entirely vapid and hollow. At no point is the audience allowed to completely suspend disbelief--one always knows one is observing art, so those wishing to see character development or much in the way of conventional plot, per se, will be sorely disappointed. Though it may take some getting used to, Nashville is a good film, definitely one-of-its-kind and one never imitated by subsequent directors. Frankly, I don't know how one could.

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The original theatrical trailer can be viewed here.

Plastic Fantastic Lover

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:23:31 -0700

The "plastic fantastic lover" described in this song is television and its "program waste". Sadly, this song has become more and more relevant with every passing year.

Perfection

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 07:26:38 -0700

Cover of a Badfinger song, "Perfection" off the album Straight Up.