These films
have two things in common. They depict characters that are marginalized, living
on the edge of society bearing secrets that isolate them from ordinary human
relationships. And they both star the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, an
extraordinary actor who has an uncanny ability to appear understated yet
riveting.
In every
other way, however, they couldn’t be more different.
A Most Wanted Man (2014) is a film based
on the novel of the same name by John le Carré. A tale of international
espionage set in the world of terrorism, we watch a Chechen man, Issa Karpov
(Grigoriy Dobrygin) tortured and fearing for his life, enter Hamburg Germany
illegally only to be caught up in forces far beyond his control. And we watch
Günther Bachmann, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, a German antiterrorist
agent seek to unravel a web of deceit and danger only to discover that he too
is caught up in forces far beyond his control.
As in most
le Carré stories, the action is not found in high speed car chases, gun battles
and fisticuffs but is located in a deadly cat and mouse game that unfolds as
intelligence agents manipulate events and people to try to reach some desired
end. Hoffman plays his role brilliantly, a rumpled, alcoholic agent who has
been burned by his German superiors and American allies, has watched carefully
constructed networks unravel and informants killed, and who is willing to wait,
and scheme,
The tension
is palpable as the story unfolds, and as John le Carré never tires of reminding
us, in the world of international espionage there are not always clear winners
and losers. Even the winners able to shut down some terrorist plot before it
occurs can lose something of their souls in the process. A world where deceit,
lies, and manipulation are the tools of the trade is hardly a kind place.
The last
film in which Hoffman starred before his death, A Most Wanted Man is very worth seeing. It is both good cinematic
art and a compelling, deeply human story.
Rated R,
122 minutes.
Mary and Max (2009) is a feature length
claymation film, starring two characters, Mary Daisy Dinkle (voiced by Toni
Collette) and Max Jerry Horovitz (voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman). Both are
painfully lonely when they become pen pals. Mary is eight years old, lives in
Melborne, Australia and has a large birthmark on her forehead that is, as she
puts it, “the color of poo.” Max is a 44 year-old severely obese man with
Asperger’s who lives alone in a dingy New York apartment. “People often think I
am tactless and rude,” he tells Mary. “I cannot understand how being honest can
be improper. Maybe this is why I don’t have any friends.”
If your
exposure to Claymation is limited to Wallace
and Gromit (must viewing, by the way) or Veggie Tales (good for babysitting but badly moralistic) Mary and Max will be a revelation. The
attention to detail is astounding and the humor is dry—in one scene in a
cemetery a tombstone in the background reads “R.I.P. Adam Elliot,” with the
epitaph “very over-rated.” The film’s director and writer is Adam Elliot. The
characters, all troubled and broken, are depicted with a warm sympathy that
insists they be website , “Mary and Max is innocent but not naïve,
as it takes us on a journey that explores friendship, autism, taxidermy,
psychiatry, alcoholism, where babies come from, obesity.” It also explores
chocolate, atheism, and the delight of snail mail letter writing.
Mary and Max is a superb example of the
art of clay animation in film, and very worth seeing. Expect to have scenes
from the movie lodged deeply in your imagination.
Not rated,
92 minutes.
I’m not certain what I find most annoying—the fact that
certain things annoy me, or that they annoy me every time they occur. I’m also not
certain what happens to you when you are annoyed; when I am annoyed what
happens is an inner rant.
Annoyance: I dislike airline travel. The tight fit, the
uncomfortable seats, the teeny packets of peanuts, being herded like cattle,
the seedy, worn appearance of most passenger jets, and most of all—here is the
annoyance—passengers who will not check their luggage. The cover of the April
16, 2012 issue of The New Yorker—a
brilliant depiction of a scene that, no matter how small you believe government
should be, should be outlawed. Out. Lawed. (The rant has begun.)
Inner rant: I’ve heard people say they will not check
luggage because the airlines now charge for each bag. That is annoying, I
agree, but if you can afford to fly at all you can afford the added luggage
fee. It’s part of the cost. Budget for it. If you really can’t afford it, stay
home. I’ve heard other people claim they will not check luggage because luggage
is sometimes lost. True enough, and more than annoying, but that is merely part
of the inconvenience of travel, which is, you should remember, a choice. If you
are going to travel, you will need to take your chances like the rest of us.
Besides, it doesn’t happen all that often. The reason I’ve heard most often,
however, are people saying they will not check their luggage because it saves
them time. Of all the excuses I’ve heard, this is the one that is the most
annoying. I have no doubt that you save time by not checking luggage. What you
must realize is that you steal time from the rest of us while we wait for you
to store it all and then wrestle it back out of the overhead bins. Some of us
would like to get out of this crowded space, stretch our legs, and stop
breathing germ-laden reused air. Some of us desperately need to find a
bathroom. Some of us are just annoyed watching you work up a sweat heaving the
equivalent of a home closet in and out of a little bin that was designed to
hold briefcases and little bags. And some of us don’t like having strangers
waste our time and then consider it a smart move.
OK, rant over.
Am I the only one?
I’d love to hear what annoys you, and your rants, even if it
is about the unhappy looks you receive from fellow passengers while retrieving
55-gallon oil drums from overhead bins.
From the usual definition of fear—a distressing, unpleasant
emotion evoked by the dread of or threat of imminent harm—we’d assume people
don’t line up to pay good money to be frightened. But the lines outside haunted
houses and theaters showing horror films prove us wrong. We don’t like being
afraid but somehow are attracted to fear.
I wonder if this love of being scared isn’t hardwired into
us as human beings. Created as finite we exist as tiny creatures in an
expansive cosmos, and so live on the edge of a greatness that shocks our
imagination. Called into existence by God’s word, if God were to withdraw his
sustaining word we would tumble back into the nothingness from which we came.
And in a fallen world we live knowing that death shadows us, and every glimpse
into that abyss once again underscores our finitude. Not surprising then, that
biblical incidents where people experience the presence of God and his angelic
warriors find them struck down with fear (Isaiah 6:5; Daniel 8:17; Revelation
1:17). Nor is it surprising that a healthy fear of the Almighty is a sign of
wisdom and maturity, demonstrating an ability to rightly discern reality
(Proverbs 1:7; 1 Peter 2:17).
Thus the yearning for spirituality, for God, for meaning
that transcends the narrow confines of time and space includes a search for a
proper fear. We find this unpleasant response somehow strangely attractive,
needed to jolt us into a sense that we might after all exist.
Perhaps this explains the attractiveness of places like The Nightmares Fear Factory, a tourist attraction at Niagara Falls, Canada, billed
as “The World’s Most Frightening Experience.” It takes fifteen minutes or less
to walk through it, and at the corner in which the fear peaks The Factory has
installed a camera. They post pictures online (which you can see here).
My question is: why are these pictures so funny?
[Source: Thanks to Andrew Sullivan on The Dish, where I
first heard about The Nightmares Fear Factory.]
Living in the upper midwest means, among other things that I live in jello country. It appears as a salad, a dessert, a side dish, and with various things thrown in before it sets, like celery, shredded carrot, and fruit, that then become suspended. If you watch The Office, you will remember the wonderful episodes in which office tools were likewise buried.
This video, however, let's us see jello in a whole new way. Bouncing jello cubes in slow motion:
Sometimes we just need a reason to smile, and here is one. Even if you don't like fishing, or TV fishing shows, here is a video of bloopers that I found funny.
Before our friends, Peter and Dawn, returned to Australia, we asked them for some movie recommendations. The first one they mentioned was Kenny, about a guy who runs a porta-potty (Australians call them portaloos) business named Splash Down. “A great comedy,” they said, “real Australian humor,” and they started laughing just remembering the film.
Kenny takes his job seriously, and as he points out, if he didn’t the rest of us would be in deep, well, deep in the product he specialized in collecting and carting away. “I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” Kenny says, “it’s 80% water and we’ve got chemicals to take care of the remaining 20.” At festivals he puts in long hours, cleaning the toilets, fishing out rings that were mistakenly dropped, and dealing with plugged and overflowing facilities. “There’s another classic example,” Kenny says wearily, “of someone having a two inch arsehole and us having installed only one inch piping.”
Kenny is hardly a great film, but it succeeds by being funny and believable. Filmed as a mock documentary, Kenny introduces us to his work, his family, and to the grand convention of waste management, The International Pumper & Cleaner Expo in Nashville, TN—which Kenny affectionately refers to as “Poo HQ.”
I don’t remember when I’ve laughed so hard at a film, only to be surprised when the second half turns into a poignant story of broken human beings trying to make their way through a broken world amidst sadly broken relationships. Kenny is the story of a likable and decent worker who does a job well, only to be despised by the people whom he serves—if they bother to notice him at all. “I’d love to be able to say ‘I plumb toilets’ and have someone say, ‘Now that is something I’ve always wanted to do.’” G. K. Chesterton published a Father Brown mystery where, if I remember correctly, the murderer had initially escaped noticed because he was dressed a postman so nobody noticed him as he walked away from the crime down a busy street. I wonder how many other people remain invisible to me?
[Kenny is rated PG-13.]
Dave Barry on travel:
“We travel because, no matter how comfortable we are at home, there’s a part of us that wants—that needs—to see new vistas, take new tours, obtain new traveler’s checks, buy new souvenirs, order new entrees, introduce new bacteria into our intestinal tracts, learn new words for ‘transfusion,’ and have all the other travel adventures that make us want to french-kiss our doormats when we finally get home.”
Dave Barry on grocery labels:
“When I purchase a food item at the supermarket, I can be confident that the label will state how much riboflavin is in it. The United States government requires this, and for a good reason, which is: I have no idea. I don’t even know what riboflavin is. I do know I eat a lot of it. For example, I often start the day with a hearty Kellogg's strawberry Pop-Tart, which has, according to the label, a riboflavin rating of 10 percent. I assume this means that 10 percent of the Pop-Tart is riboflavin. Maybe it’s the red stuff in the middle. Anyway, I’m hoping riboflavin is a good thing; if it turns out that it’s a bad thing, like ‘riboflavin’ is the Latin word for ‘cockroach pus,’ then I am definitely in trouble.”
The source of both quotes can be found here.
The best social satire always reflects the truth about life. When it gets too far from reality, it’s merely comedy, perhaps funny, but the bite is gone.
That’s one reason the Colbert Report (Comedy Central) is so good. The show is meant to be entertainment, not journalism, but you learn a great deal about what’s happening in the world by laughing at Stephen Colbert’s scathingly witty take on the events of the day.
A recent front page story in The Onion made me laugh, and then pause at the deep sadness behind the satire. (You can read the story here.) It was a story on a new product called Advil Release, for “when feeling nothing is just too much.”
Wyeth Pharmaceuticals unveiled a new pain-causing line of Advil this week that will help millions of benumbed, hollow consumers to feel at least somewhat alive for up to four hours.
“Advil Release delivers a soothing burst of pain when cold and listless Americans need it most,” Wyeth CEO Bernard J. Poussot said during a press conference Monday. “Just two capsules can deliver all-day relief in the form of searing, life-affirming agony; the kind of agony Advil users trust when being a pale specter of humanity adrift in a meaningless and uncaring universe is just not an option anymore…”
Other pharmaceutical companies have also begun marketing their own brands of over-the-counter medications that will help the emotionally anesthetized feel briefly alive. The makers of NyQuil are reportedly developing a new product they describe as “the nighttime sniffling, sneezing, aching, screaming, crying, writhing, so you can possibly—for the love of God—experience some sense of normalcy medicine.”
It reminds me of a local tattoo shop, Infinity Tattoo. Their ads read, Infinity Tattoo: you’re damn right it hurts.
To feel numb and directionless, uncertain of any sense of purpose that can bring meaning to the random details of a frantic life is an expression of the Fall that brings people to the very edge of the abyss. I may not have felt it as fully as others have, but I desperately want ears sensitive to the sound of despair, and a life that allows me to offer the gift of unhurried time for listening.
The mysterious wonder of the gospel is that only Christianity claims a God who experiences utter abandonment, and the pain of being alive in a universe without God.