Oliver Stone’s “W” opened in theaters Friday, to mixed reviews.

“History is said to repeat itself as tragedy and farce, but here it registers as a full-blown burlesque,” writes Manohla Dargis. “It says nothing new or insightful about the president, his triumphs and calamities. (As if anyone goes to an Oliver Stone movie for a reality check.) But it does something most journalism and even documentaries can’t or won’t do: it reminds us what a long, strange trip it’s been to the Bush White House.”

If the idea of watching a fictional version of the Bush presidency gives you a headache, there is an alternative. Contributor Richard C. Crepeau was invited to a critics’ screening of a new film sure to delight young and old, as well as the “undecideds.” Here’s the trailer, as Dick remembers it:

From a time not long ago, and a place far away, comes the story of a hockey mom and Arctic Circle maverick, chosen to lead a nation …

“The Unbearable Being of Lightness: The Sarah Palin Story”

Starring …
Tina Fey as Sarah Palin
Sarah Palin as Tina Fey
John McCain as Tina Fey’s Running Mate

With …
Viggo Mortenson as “Todd the Snowshoe Secessionist”
Charles Bronson as “The State Trooper in Question”
Frances McDormand as Katie Couric

And introducing …
Karl Rove as “Earmark”
and
The Bridge to Nowhere as “The Bridge to Nowhere”

Plus …
Special guest appearance by George W. Bush as “The Man Who Thinks He’s Still President,” explaining the Bush Doctrine to a distracted crowd at a hockey rink

Don’t Miss …
- Watch a hockey mom shoot living things at the Arctic Circle from a B-52 while listening to “Jonah33″ on her iPod!

- Be amazed as the foreign policy maverick re-ignites the Cold War from her front porch, after she looks into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and sees his soul!

And, for the first time anywhere …
Sarah “The Barracuda” Palin challenges Barack Obama to go one-on-one in a half-court game!

Coming soon to a theater near you …

I’m the last person to celebrate the life of a celebrity — but I will make at least one exception: Paul Newman.

My fervent hope is that future generations of superstars take his cue — on two fronts.

First, he shunned the entire Hollywood machine, even while he was living off it.  He created an entirely new definition of “staying humble.”

Second, he never felt he should hide his politics for the sake of his art.

Thanks, Paul.

The following is a new article by Tim Mitchell, published in the “depth” section of PopPolitics magazine. Mitchell has previously written for PopPolitics about the “Mimic” film trilogy and “Versus” horror films like Alien vs. Predator and Freddy vs. Jason. Now he tackles the technological complexities of “Dark City” — just in time for the DVD release of a new director’s cut:

The 1998 film “Dark City” will be re-released on DVD this week in a new director’s cut that features additional footage. I’ve always felt that “Dark City” never received the recognition it deserved — due in no small part to being overshadowed later by a very similar film, “The Matrix,” in 1999.

What is particularly intriguing about “Dark City” is that it combines many narrative themes specific to science fiction (aliens, space and time travel, and computer technology running amok) with elements of German Expressionism and film noir to create a narrative that provides an unique commentary on the role of technology, including cinematic technology, in the shaping of both the individual and society.

The film’s director, Alex Proyas, ultimately creates a haunting dystopian commentary on today’s media-saturated world.

Continue reading “Man, Machine, Memory and Movies: A Critical Look at ‘Dark City’“

Greg Braxton writes in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times:

There’s a somewhat surprising consensus that admirable black fictional figures may have subtly conditioned the electorate to be receptive to a candidate like Obama, the presumptive Democratic standard-bearer.

“One wonders to what degree a scenario played out in a safe, contained, fictionalized context might have prepared people for the real thing,” said Darnell Hunt, a professor of sociology and director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. “Popular culture is more than mere entertainment. It gives us a dress rehearsal for the real thing. We can imagine who we are and who we would like to be.”

Make-believe black presidents occupy an odd little corner of pop culture, a territory that a few notable films and television programs have staked out.

The piece makes some unsubstantiated psychological leaps, but it is worth it simply for the history it provides of black presidents on the big and small screen. It sent me on a search, for example, to find more info about a short film, “Rufus Jones for President” (1933), starring a very young Sammy Davis Jr. as a black 7-year-old elected president (see it here) and about a a full-length film “The Man” (1972), starring James Earl Jones “that is largely credited with being the first serious treatment of a black man becoming president”:

Based on an Irving Wallace novel, the movie starred James Earl Jones as the Senate president pro tem who suddenly ascends to the Oval Office after the untimely deaths of the president and speaker of the House and the illness of the vice president.

In the poster for the film, Jones is pictured taking the oath of office at a ceremony populated by white politicians. The tag line for the movie reads “The first black president of the United States. First they swore him in. Then they swore to get him.”

Braxton interviews at length the minds behind two more recent representations of black presidents: the satirical film “Head of State,” in which Chris Rock plays May Gilliam, an ordinary man who ascends to the presidency, and the television series “24,” which began, maybe more radically, in the middle of the presidency of David Palmer (portrayed by Dennis Haysbert)., in which the qualifications of David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) for the highest office were never questioned.

Worthwhile photo galleries accompany the article.

The only issue I have with the article — and this is true for much coverage of pop culture in the mainstream media — is it focuses too heavily on how “life imitates art,” how pop culture is a progressive, forward-thinking force.

While I wouldn’t deny the power of pop culture to change minds, I think it is equally important that we put pop culture in its own historical context — and see it reflecting the anxieties and prejudices of its day, even as it imagines such a “progressive” scenario as a black presidency.

With the exception of David Palmer on “24″ — where a black presidency was accepted as matter-of-fact — all the other representations that Braxton notes can be seen as actually regressive.

It’s telling that on the DVD commentary to “Head of State” Chris Rock says, “I don’t know if I’ll see a black president in my lifetime.” While Braxton sees this as a laughable “misunderstanding,” he ignores that fact that the intention of the Rock’s film was not to lay the groundwork for a future black presidency — it was to express how much racism is an almost impenetrable obstacle to black leadership.

The following is a new article by Tim Mitchell, published in the “depth” section of PopPolitics magazine. Mitchell analyzes how the underappreciated “Mimic” trilogy of sci-fi horror films has a lot to say about postmodern America:

The other day, I found an October 2007 story by R. Colin Johnson on the EETimes Web site that sounded like something out of the Weekly World News: “Darpa hatches plan for insect cyborgs to fly reconnaissance.” According to the article:

Cyborg insects with embedded microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) will run remotely controlled reconnaissance missions for the military, if its ‘”HI-MEMS” program succeeds. Hybrid-Insect MEMS — a program hatched earlier this year at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) — aims to harness insects the way horses were harnessed by the cavalry. … The final milestone … will be flying a cyborg insect to within five meters of a specific target located some one hundred meters away using remote control or a global positioning system (GPS). If HI-MEMS passes this test successfully, then Darpa will probably begin breeding in earnest. Insect swarms with various sorts of different embedded MEMS sensors — video cameras, audio microphones, chemical sniffers and more — could then penetrate enemy territory in swarms to perform reconnaissance missions impossible or too dangerous for soldiers.

Not surprisingly, the article cites this project’s origin as being rooted in science fiction:

This vision of enhanced animals with electro-mechanical controllers was imagined in a 1990 novel called “Sparrowhawk,” in which author Thomas Easton imagines bioengineering enlarged birds and insects to use as beasts-of-burden. … In a HI-MEMS world, cyborg bugs would patrol, gather intelligence, penetrate secret meetings, track targets, retrieve samples and more — all predicted by Easton’s 1990 book.

While privacy rights issues are discussed in the context of a techno-insect world, the later half of the article reassures the reader that Darpa’s plan has more than a few bugs in it. “If Darpa’s track record is any indicator, then we have some breathing room before we have to start worrying whether that insect crawling on the wall is conducting unwarranted surveillance,” it states. “Only a fraction of the wide-ranging programs that Darpa sponsors are successful — at least in the way they were originally imagined.”

Reading this piece reminded me of the “Mimic” trilogy, a series of science fiction/horror films that began on the big screen in 1997 and was followed by two direct-to-DVD sequels. All three movies were loosely inspired by a short story of the same name that was written by Donald A. Wolheim in 1942. The central premises of the “Mimic” trilogy — humanity biologically manipulating organisms for explicitly human purposes and technologically altered insects infiltrating human populations unnoticed — are similar to Darpa’s cyborg bug project and other projects that focus on genetic engineering.

This article examines the “Mimic” films, particularly how the plot device of the “Big Bug” monster is still relevant to public discourse on scientific issues. In particular, concepts and issues that are specific to genetic research and their related environmental and political impacts permeate the “Mimic” films, thus making them different from their irradiated Atomic Age predecessors and worthy of unique consideration.

Continue reading “Pictures of Insect Men: A Retrospective Analysis of the “Mimic” Trilogy.”

“Iron Man” is a great movie for a lot of reasons, not the least of which are the action sequences and pyrotechnic displays. Ultimately, though, the themes go deeper than this, and the informed viewer can sense their complexity beneath the surface of the film. Behind the character story of a young Playboy taking responsibility for his actions, and beneath the technological tale of a hero being born out of a medical miracle, there’s also the story of a war of technological innovation… a sort of a clash of engineering titans… and there’s a metaphor for military force. It’s this last theme that I’ll address, for the time being.

A lot of ‘Iron Man” is about Tony Stark’s life’s work, and a lot of Stark’s legacy is based on military power and a relationship to hegemony. Stark begins the movie with his finger on the big red button, trusting in absolute power and overwhelming coverage as an ethical way to keep the world safe. This is truly a Cold War mentality, an international survivalism staked on the fact that America will always have the biggest stick. Stark’s work in the world is designing massive military weapons that “you only have to fire ONCE.”

Of course, Stark discovers the downfall of this approach when he’s kidnapped in Afghanistan. When military power gets big enough, it can’t be controlled or contained any longer, and it becomes as much the enemy’s tool as it is our own. He sees that he can’t even trust his own company with this kind of power, and he sees that this isn’t just a flaw in his company… it’s a flaw in this whole approach to power. For this reason, instead of simply taking back control of his company’s weapons distribution, he decides to shut down Stark Industries’ weapons division entirely. Complete military dominance is no longer Tony Stark’s thing.

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The following is a new article by Tim Mitchell, published in the “depth” section of PopPolitics magazine. Mitchell analyzes how critically discarded “versus” horror films can tell us a great deal about how we see conflict in the post-9/11 world.

Horror is like any other genre of film: The most popular titles of a given era often gain their notoriety by striking a chord in audiences that is somehow related to the collective fears and hopes of that particular time. Along those lines, when critics associate horror films with modern social and political fears in post-9/11 America, they usually cite films of an apocalyptic nature: films that portray a community (or the entire world itself) as irrevocably unraveling at lightening speed at the hands of a monstrosity that is equal parts unexplainable, unstoppable and unavoidable.

Films released during the last several years such as “The Host“; “Sunshine“; “28 Weeks Later“; “Right at Your Door“; “Cloverfield“; “Land of the Dead“; and “Diary of the Dead” fit this trend. So do recent remakes such as “Dawn of the Dead,” and literary adaptations such as “War of the Worlds“; “30 Days of Night“; “I Am Legend“; and “The Mist.” These are akin to earlier films such as “Them!” (1954) and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) that reflected the public’s fears of atomic weapons and communism back in the 1950s.

There is another kind of horror film that complements and yet contrasts this end-of-the-world sub-genre of horror, a kind of horror film that most critics dismiss. Unlike many of the apocalyptic films, these films do not so much depict a supreme battle between good and evil, but instead plague their characters with nothing but damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t choices.

Fears of vicious attacks and random massacres are not the product of some aberration of the natural order but an honest reflection of how the universe actually works. Thus, fears of this type of world do not center on vanquishing monsters to save others so much as on just surviving in a pre-determined situation. What kind of horror film is this? The crossover film that has the word “versus” in the title — namely, “Freddy vs. Jason” (2003), “Alien vs. Predator” (2004) and the recent “Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem” (2007).

Continue reading “A Look at Iconic Versus: The Post-9/11 Significance of the Freddy vs. Jason and Alien vs. Predator Movies.”

It’s about time.

It’s been two decades since “Pretty Woman” made prostitution seem cool — a path to self-esteem and self-empowerment — and I have rarely seen, outside of academic journals and hard-hitting documentaries, such an effective puncturing of that cultural myth as I read today in an opinion piece by Anne K. Ream and R. Clifton Spargo of the Chicago Tribune, who were inspired by the media’s recent treatment of Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the prostitute who famously serviced the former Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer.

Of course, the glorification of prostitution began long before “Pretty Woman,” but as Ream and Spargo point out, since that film hit the big screen, the myth-making has reached ridiculous extremes — from “Pimp and Ho” nights at clubs to “Turning Tricks” pole-dancing at gyms.

And that’s not even mentioning TV shows like HBO’s “Cathouse” — “where a Nevada pimp and his ‘girls’ are portrayed as one big, happy, sexually uninhibited family.” That show and others “are an ode to the joys of being sexually serviced by women.”

I realize we need to be careful not to condemn sex workers for their choices — which are often made from a very limited list of options. But we need to make sure we don’t end up justifying a system that ultimately devastates women’s lives.

Ream and Spargo rightly note, “Our cultural fascination with and glamorization of pimping and prostitution do not make for a kinder and gentler sex trade.” And they go one to cite statistics — from 90 percent of prostitutes having been victims of childhood sexual assault to jaw-dropping mortatily rates:

A comprehensive 2004 mortality study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and conducted by the American Journal of Epidemiology, shows that workplace homicide rates for women working in prostitution are 51 times that of the next most dangerous occupation for women (which is working in a liquor store). The average age of death of the women studied was 34.

Yet somehow it’s almost conventional wisdom that prostitution, if done right, can be a savvy career move and an avenue to self-fulfillment:

Nowhere was this more clear than on a recent edition of “Larry King Live.” During an interview with Natalie McLennan, the woman who allegedly trained Dupre at the escort agency New York Confidential, King asked, “Do any hookers ever marry their johns?”

“They do!” she exclaimed, telling King the tale of a fellow “girl” who “went on a date with a client and then we never saw her again. It turns out that they met and they fell in love and she never returned. It’s a real sort of Cinderella, ‘Pretty Woman’ story, you know. Which is I think . . . just a fantastic story — ”every girl’s dream.”

For the vast majority of women working in prostitution, however, the reality is less fairy tale, more grim fable. But who wants to let that get in the way of a good story?

This is one of those dominant cultural narratives that we must do a much better job of resisting.

In “King Corn,” directors Aaron Woolf, Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney move to Iowa to plant and harvest one acre of corn, in an attempt to learn more about this ubiquitous crop’s role in the American food supply. It will air tonight on PBS on Independent Lens, 10 p.m. EST.

I saw the movie two weeks ago at a small screening in Boston. I had heard it was filmed in Greene, Iowa, 10 minutes from the town where I grew up. It’s a rare movie that features Iowa, and no movies ever are made in “my” county. Not even low-budget documentaries. So naturally I was thrilled about this and had e-mailed the trailer to everyone I knew from my life pre-college. Add to this that it was a movie about two guys who move from Boston to Iowa — cue audience laughter, ha! who would do such a thing! — and I was doubly interested, having done that precise trip the other way around.

Ian Cheney (left) and Curt Ellis sample their crop in Greene, Iowa
Photo by Sam Cullman

I invited my friend Lynn along (because she’s from Minnesota), and made my 14-year-old daughter go, too (because I think it’s important that children learn about corn). She brought her friend Dan, who went along under the mistaken impression that it was a science fiction movie.

“She” — and here he pointed an accusing finger at my daughter — “told me it was a movie about people who find out they’re made out of corn!” Which was technically accurate, that is what it was about — it’s just that it was true. It begins with two guys taking a hair test and realizing they’re mostly corn products.

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Alex in Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park”

Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park” is a movie on the edge of experimental, just narrative enough to be engaging, but artistic enough that it might make you scratch your head a bit. As with Gus Van Sant’s other movies, like “Elefant,” it’s about tortured youth and disillusionment. As a cinema experience, as much as it seems obtuse and existential, it probably has something really worthwhile to say to us about the way we’re experiencing the world.

It’s hard to pin the central theme down to anything in particular, because the story revolves around the life of the main character and portrays it in a number of ways: mundane, terrifying, and romanticized. At times, Alex is a detached, understimulated teenager; at times, he is a pragmatic actor with opinions and agency; at times, he is a dreamer adrift in his own head. At the turning point of the story, he is a frightened, paralyzed victim of circumstance, and a fallible human who has to deal with a range of unintended consequences.

A good deal of the film focuses on the filler between the important moments in Alex’s life. We often accompany him on his walks to and from class, and we often gaze for extended scenes into his eyes as he looks at somebody sitting next to him. The attention given to these minutiae makes it seem, at times, like the whole movie is an account of Alex’s denial and avoidance of the tragedy he witnessed. This aspect is what makes Ken Fox of TVGuide.com call the film “Dostoyevskian.” Read in a certain way, it’s a study of guilt seeping into everyday life in subtle ways, like “Crime and Punishment” so long before.

This definitely doesn’t adequately describe the movie, though. At certain times, Alex seems to have a real, believable teenagehood and agency, even apart from the psychological burden he’s bearing. For much of the film, his words are credible: he gives a good reason for being at Paranoid Park, and a believable reason for breaking up with his girlfriend, and he seems to care about his friends. We’re also introduced to his dream world, fantasies of skateboarding shown in grainy slow-motion shots, and this doesn’t seem to be a shallow facade created simply to cover up his guilt and fear. If his life is already empty and detached, is there even anything for a tragedy to suddenly “upset”?

Ultimately, the film becomes an exercise in misdirection: the dramatic moments are offset by the long, slow lingering shots, and the core emotional crisis is wrapped by a sort of existential crisis of teenagehood, equally poignant, but much more common.

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The following is a new film review by Laura Fokkena posted at PopPolitics Magazine.

Chicago-based filmmaker Usama Alshaibi in a scene from the documentary “Nice Bombs.”

In January of 2004, just as dawn was breaking, Chicago-based filmmaker Usama Alshaibi bribed the guards on Iraq’s Jordanian border and drove back into the country he hadn’t seen in 24 years. He brought along his American-born wife, Kristie, and a video camera.

The resulting documentary, “Nice Bombs: My Journey Back to Iraq,” was the winner of the Chicago Underground Film Festival’s 2006 award for best documentary feature and the Tribeca All-Access Creative Promise Award for a documentary feature. It has since screened in New York City, Santa Fe and Milwaukee. It will premiere on the Sundance Channel Wednesday, March 19 at 6:30 p.m. EST. (Watch the trailer.)

Alshaibi was born in Baghdad in 1969. When he was 11 years old, his mother, fearing the escalating war with Iran, hid the family’s gold in his little brother’s diaper and slipped her four children over Iraq’s southern border with Kuwait, telling the guards they were taking a short trip out of the country for medical reasons. The ruse worked and, after a few years of bouncing around various Arab countries, the family finally landed in Iowa City.

In 1991, Alshaibi had just turned 21 and was studying art at The University of Iowa when the first Gulf War broke out. He received a letter from the INS informing him that his residency had expired and he was to be deported back to Iraq. He also got another letter, this one from Baghdad, drafting him into the Iraqi army. He applied, successfully, for political asylum in the United States, and eventually became a naturalized citizen.

With the horror of war finally behind him, why go back? His own mother, after all, said she’d never forgive him if he returned.

“For so long there was this part of my past that was invisible,” Alshaibi explains, “and I missed it.”

But he also blames Studs Terkel.

Continue reading “Back to Baghdad: ‘Nice Bombs’ Targets Life During Wartime”

I love movies that inspire a positive reception, and then a backlash, and then an anti-backlash. That’s the sign of a film that’s getting under our cultural skins, and the big winner in that regard, neatly wrapping up 2007, was “Juno,” a smart little film that positions itself somewhere between the emotional uncertainty of “Garden State” and the juvenile self-discovery of “Superbad.”

The controversy over “Juno” ? specifically over whether it’s a good or a bad movie ? is coming from many directions, including Roger Ebert, who called it his favorite movie of the year, Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, who calls it the “smart, hip human comedy you’ve been waiting for all year,” and (across the fence) Jim DeRogatis, a critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, who says he hated the movie… apparently citing his experience with teenagers, feminism, and movies in general. DeRogantis in particular critiqued the film by way of its soundtrack, locating a hip insincerity in both the music and in the portrayal of the characters.

Of course, the anti-backlash responded, quite right, that reality is too fuzzy for a movie to be blamed for its lack of documentary accuracy. They also responded that there are, indeed, kids out there who, even at sixteen, are smart and unreasonably wise about their lives and their situations. I feel enough has been said about the film’s respect for “reality” (note the scare quotes), and about its soundtrack’s appropriateness to the characters portrayed. I’d prefer to look at the film from an aesthetic point of view, and to read it as a critique, rather than reading it in terms of hipness or accuracy.

What distinguishes “Juno” as a critique — specifically as a character critique, with a special emphasis on age, maturity, and gender — was its ability to interrogate our assumptions by playing to them and then breaking them back down. If you’re like me, you may have reflected on the characters halfway through the movie, and the film may actually have seemed a little sexist. By the time Juno was confronting Bleeker about going to the prom, the archetypes had been set up: all of the primary males (Bleeker, Mark, and Dad) were even-tempered, respectable, admirable characters in the classic “good guy” mold. Juno, Vanessa, and Bren, the three primary female characters, were all being set up as slightly neurotic, volatile personalities, and they seemed framed to cause whatever looming conflict was about to materialize.

Didn’t you feel, at first, that Vanessa was a bit of a neurotic yuppie, oppressing Mark’s perfectly reasonable desire for freedom? Didn’t Bren seem a little overbearing and snappy when she declared to Juno, “He’s married! There are some boundaries that you just shouldn’t cross?” It was subtle, but the film was establishing some gender expectations through its gendered characters, including Juno herself, who pulled a little bit of an emotional freakout on Bleeker in the hallway. If it had taken its plot in the most conventional direction… if it had followed up on these expectations… it would have been a tragically stereotype-affirming film, a la “Hitch,” Will Smith’s masterpiece of gender stereotyping.

But that’s not what happens. I won’t discuss plot details, but by the end of the film, “Juno” turns from a batch of established roles into a critique of those roles. Not every stereotype is fully overturned, but the characters work out differently than we were led to expect, and the ambiguity of their dynamic — especially the dynamic between Mark and Vanessa — leads us to a greater appreciation of Juno herself, a smart, controlled feminine character, wise beyond her years, but still in need of space and freedom to grow.

It may be worth noting that the pregnancy, and all its attendant issues of birth control, hardship, and stigmatization, was peripheral to the real substance of the film. The feminist question isn’t addressed in terms of womanhood and creation. Rather, it’s addressed in the portrayal of females both mobilizing and undermining their gender roles, and especially in its main character, who is the kind of rounded, admirable female that’s still tragically rare in entertainment media.

Depp and Carter in “Sweeney Todd”

This season’s non-standard holiday masterpiece was definitely “Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” a fascinating piece of cinema directed by Tim Burton, who inherited the story from playwright Stephen Sondheim. It’s certainly a hit among critics, whose reviews, collected on RottenTomatoes.com, are an impressive 86% positive. This is especially surprising for a film that’s so gory and cynical it could be considered a juvenile slasher of a movie.

I agree with the positive reviews, but it’s important to look at the levels of achievement that make the film good. I think the first level, and what you might call the hook, is the show’s complete unexpectedness. A gothic London tale, offered right at the height of the holiday season, may scream “A Christmas Carol,” and even more, it’s a musical, so it’s saddled with some of the most debilitating stereotypes in the culture industry.

Burton, with the help of Sondheim’s glorious script, manages to turn both of those expectations on their heads, and this is what attracted many of the positive reviews from critics. The film’s unflinching gore and complete cynicism fly in the face of both Christmas and musical theater, and the film allows its audience a horrific insight into the marginal possibilities of both media. The artificial (sugarcoated) fantasies of the Christmas season and musical theater are the perfect meat for Burton and Sondheims’ grinder.

But anybody can make a shocking little film, right? Claws on a cultural chalkboard don’t make a movie really good, nor worthy of overwhelmingly positive reviews in the press. I’m of the opinion that Burton’s vicious approach was a good way to get attention, but that the film’s merit lies elsewhere.

This merit — the substance that makes the story worth thinking about and appreciating — is really in the thematic levels beneath the absurdly bright blood and Depp’s howling rage. The characters’ stories, including Toby’s, Ms. Lovett’s, Anthony’s, and even Sweeney Todd’s, are actually about finding hope in a totally hopeless world. In Sweeney Todd’s case, it’s the hope of complete surrender to darkness. In Mrs. Lovett’s case, it’s unrequited love, and in Toby’s, it’s the gratitude of a son for a mother. If those violent desires aren’t enough for us this Christmas, we’re even given the innocent love of Anthony and Johanna, which perseveres while the hatred around them collapses upon itself.

This is where you find the short-term merit of this hard-hitting musical, and it’s where you find the merit in tragedy in general. The darkness of a fallen world is the perfect background for the spark of hope that every individual must find, even if it’s a bit twisted. So Burton and Sondheim have built a powerful piece of cinema on a foundation of classic principles … first, by ripping us away from the spirit of the season and the medium … and then, by bringing us back to it just enough to make it a profound experience.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought it rather weird that in between two of the usual thumbs-up reviews in a recent newspaper ad for the “Golden Compass” was a glowing review from … the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops:

“The Golden Compass” Is An Exciting Adventure Story, Entirely In Harmony With Catholic Teaching.

This is not a joke.

Considering the controversy surrounding the film’s release, it should be an encouraging sign for the Conference of Catholic Bishops to make such an unequivocal stand. But as one looks more closely at their full review, it becomes clear that they appreciate the film precisely because it has excised the theological complexity of Phillip Pullman’s novel:

The good news is that the first book’s explicit references to this church have been completely excised with only the term Magisterium retained. The choice is still a bit unfortunate, however, as the word refers so specifically to the church’s teaching authority. Yet the film’s only clue that the Magisterium is a religious body comes in the form of the icons which decorate one of their local headquarters …. Whatever author Pullman’s putative motives in writing the story, writer-director Chris Weitz’s film, taken purely on its own cinematic terms, can be viewed as an exciting adventure story with, at its core, a traditional struggle between good and evil, and a generalized rejection of authoritarianism.

This back-handed compliment of a review brings me back to Donna Freitas, a Catholic theologian who I previously noted defended the film as deeply spiritual.

Freitas, in a recent essay on Salon, argues that the continuing uproar over the film (calls for banning the entire “Dark Materials” trilogy from Catholic libraries, for example) — far from scaring Catholics away from the story — will scare them away from Catholicism itself:

Who is really endangered by all this Pullman hysteria? I worry that the species actually at risk of losing their faith as a result of all the mud being slung about Pullman’s exquisite rereading of the biblical book of Genesis are those Catholics who have read the trilogy and adored it, or (God forbid) had already given it to their kids. I worry that these lovers of great literature now feel like they sit on a dirty little secret that, if revealed, might make them persona non grata in the Catholic world they call home. But, since when are believers supposed to choose between their faith and their imagination? Between the joy of reading and the joy of sects?

As Freitas goes on to explain how her Catholicism, steeped in feminism and liberation theology, is able to see and find inspiration from Pullman’s vision, you can’t help but want the old Catholic guard to get back in touch with their inner child.

Adults don’t get it.

As I look at all the hullaballoo over the new “The Golden Compass” movie (based on the first novel in Philip Pullman’s fantasy trilogy “His Dark Materials“), I am reminded of the Ursula Le Guin pro-fantasy manifesto: “Why Are Americans So Afraid of Dragons?”

In that 1974 essay, Le Guin indicts a general cultural conservatism that sees the freedom and imagination inherent in fantasy literature as a threat, even as American children’s appetite for it seems to be insatiable.

That conservatism apparently still holds some sway today, even if it didn’t mind co-opting C.S. Lewis’ Narnia as a straightforward Christian allegory (which, I’ve argued before, distorts that wonderfully complex world). Conservative Christian groups of many colors are calling for a boycott of the newest potential fantasy juggernaut.

The best response I’ve read so far comes from an unexpected source: a Catholic theologian. Donna Freitas writes in the Boston Globe:

These books are deeply theological, and deeply Christian in their theology. The universe of “His Dark Materials” is permeated by a God in love with creation, who watches out for the meekest of all beings — the poor, the marginalized, and the lost. It is a God who yearns to be loved through our respect for the body, the earth, and through our lives in the here and now. This is a rejection of the more classical notion of a detached, transcendent God, but I am a Catholic theologian, and reading this fantasy trilogy enhanced my sense of the divine, of virtue, of the soul, of my faith in God.

The book’s concept of God, in fact, is what makes Pullman’s work so threatening. His trilogy is not filled with attacks on Christianity, but with attacks on authorities who claim access to one true interpretation of a religion. Pullman’s work is filled with the feminist and liberation strands of Catholic theology that have sustained my own faith, and which threaten the power structure of the church. Pullman’s work is not anti-Christian, but anti-orthodox.

When someone like Freitas so clearly exposes the true motives behind all the fear-mongering, it makes our job easy.