Here's another movie review that continues in the "grand" tradition of this blog - reviewing movies that are really not that new. Babies is a documentary film that came out in 2010 and is about four babies' lives from "first breath to first step", one from Namibia, one from Mongolia, one from Japan, and one from the USA. I remember seeing reviews of this movie and thinking, "Really?" It didn't strike me at the time that it'd be such a great concept. I mean, I'm a mother - I watch my baby do stuff all day, and while I occasionally find it fascinating, more often than not I find it, well, normal and therefore rather boring.
This must be one of the reasons why the director had to push this idea to several people before finding someone else willing to work with it. It must also be one of the reasons why the videographer would travel to these places and spend days there, only to return with one "good" short worth putting in the film. (Though of course, this isn't unlike the process of writing - I aim to write a couple pages a day, but much of it is definitely not staying in the book...)
I was all set to view the documentary as some kind of social commentary: you know, Western industrialized nations versus less industrialized nations and how babies do, comparatively. Or, people with "stuff" versus people without "stuff". Or, time spent versus lack of time spent. The Japanese and American mothers do very similar things, for instance: song and dance classes for their young babies; day care situations, et cetera.
About ten minutes into it, I stopped thinking in this way and just started enjoying the process of watching these babies. The director creatively pairs film shorts together and it makes a satisfying collage of love and care for the smallest members of our human clan. (Or, should I even say, it makes an interesting board book movie? My 3 month-old "watched" parts of this film and was fascinated.)
The US family is a "green" ecologically-minded family; the Japanese family lives in one of the busiest sectors of Tokyo; the Mongolian family is a relatively well-off herding family, and the Namibian family seems mostly to consists of mothers and children - the men are off herding and farming. It's an eclectic group; you wouldn't expect to find much in common necessarily, except that these babies are loved and cared for with very obvious joy.
Viewers who have always been curious about breastfeeding will see fantastic images of babies nursing, including the Namibian mother tandem nursing. And, I was curious about how people who don't use diapers manage - very well, as it happens.
This is also a funny film - as one might imagine with babies, there are plenty of moments that made me want to laugh. One is when the American baby is eating a banana and very painstakingly picks off each bit of the peel before eating it. Then she bites into the wrong end and finds herself chewing on that bad-tasting end bit of bananas, and spits that out. Another is the moment when the Monogolian baby, swaddled and lying on a bed, all of a sudden finds himself surrounded by a rooster that is at least twice his size. The rooster just dances around the bed. Still another is when the Namibian baby has learned to walk and starts balancing something (the end of a plastic jug, I think?) on her head - I was highly impressed by her walking and balancing skills.
Ultimately, the theme of the movie seems to be one that contributes an argument to the Western "mommy wars" problem. (So okay, I am going to find a point here - but not the one I was originally looking for...) Here was an array of parents and cultures and parenting styles, and they all work. The Namibian mother was the one who was most obviously with her baby all the time, in a very relaxed way - more relaxed than I think sometimes the pressure of being a "stay at home mom" feels in Western culture. But her husband and sons were often gone many days out of the month. "Work out of the home" moms were represented by the Western mothers. The Japanese mother worked out of the home and so we saw a day care scene but we also see her and her husband taking care of the baby at home. The American parents tried to work as a team, and it seemed that they did more trading off of parental duties, around their office work, than the others.
And a different way of running the family shows up in the the Mongolian family. They, too, tried to pair up their parenting, probably by necessity. Both the mother and father were doing work with the herding animals and so would intersperse child care with animal care. That meant the baby was left alone fairly often - and we see him crawling around outside, enjoying the weather, and investigating the broad world while the parents are off at some distance.
Maybe the point was: you do what you have to do to make a living and care for the kids. None of these represents an "ideal" for parenthood except for the common thread of desiring to care for the babies so that they are healthy, have some freedom to learn to crawl and walk and talk, and that there is something joyful about nurturing a baby.
The movie is not really about the parents, though, but the babies themselves and that is ultimately what makes one become mesmerized: their extraordinary growth, their wonder, their joy.
One final funny moment, for me anyway: at one point, the American father takes his daughter to a song time, where they sing 'The Earth is our Mother." The chant threw me off at first because it starts before you see that we're in the US and I thought, "Huh, this must be in one of the non-American countries - maybe they do chant there." And then I was laughing at myself because I saw the American father, AND I remembered singing this song probably when I was three years old myself. I think of it as a very, very "hippy" song. But what made it even funnier is that the baby stands up, walks out of the singing circle and tries to open the door. "Let me out, please!" Exactly what I'd be doing anyway, if I found myself having to sing that song again. (Hey, I like being ecologically friendly but I'm not sure that's what this song is really about....)
Anyway, if you haven't had the chance to see Babies, I highly recommend finding a copy somewhere. It will give you hope - a good thing to have these days.
Showing posts with label movie review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movie review. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Movie Review: "The Invention of Lying"
Obviously, this is not one of those cool, up-to-the-minute, hot-off-the-press reviews. Philosophy PhD and I tend to get our movies from the library and we also don't watch TV, so we have very little, if anything, to offer toward opinions on up-to-the-minute films.
"The Invention of Lying" is a film I chose from the Fast Views section of the library - DVDs that are semi-new. I had never heard of the film before, but the premise as described on the back of the box seemed promising. Now that we've seen it (well, admittedly, only about half of it) it has continued to occupy my thoughts as a kind of mind worm, so here we are: my blog's first movie review.
The premise really is rather interesting: a world, very much like ours, but where people do not know how to lie.Then one day, in a moment of desperation because he's about to become homeless, the protagonist develops a sudden capacity (perhaps via evolution? The film hints at this but really doesn't go into depth) to say that he has more money in his bank account than he actually does. He clearly believes it won't work but strangely, it does! The teller believes him and he finds himself able to pay his rent. From there, he goes on to use his new found skill/genetic change to hit on girls and steal loads of money from a casino.
Our protagonist also has a mother who is close to death in a very depressing nursing home. She has a heart attack and, as she lays there dying and afraid to die because she knows there is nothing after death, her son concocts a "lie" telling her how happy and joyful things are when we die, how everyone has a mansion, etc.
Therein lies the crux of the whole film. The doctors and nurses have overheard the son's explanation and believe it; the son's lie makes the news so that people all around the world start wondering at and believing in this alternate life-after-death reality.
This is the part when we turned off the film. I googled the film later and found that Ricky Gervais is an atheist and clearly has an argument he wants to display here, that a happy afterlife can't exist. Apparently (because again, I haven't seen this part of the film and doubtless won't) Gervais' character invents a "Big Man in the Sky" who told him all about this afterlife, which then overtakes peoples' realities and makes them believe in things that don't really exist.
It wasn't actually the life-after-death "lie" that was the major cause of our not finishing the movie. That was just the cherry on top of a number of other fantastical things that happen in the movie. We'd been wondering whether to turn it off prior - so that when we reached the point where it was quite clear that the movie had a bone to pick with "religion" we knew, okay, this really is not a movie we want to continue watching.
The problems, from our points of view as philosopher and theologian, were numerous. First was the way in which truth telling was depicted from the beginning: the characters just feel free to blurt out whatever they are thinking. Telling the truth is more about behaving like my three-year-old, as we got a running commentary on what each character was literally thinking and doing any time they opened their mouths. The female romantic lead talks to the protagonist about the fact that she was masturbating when he rang the doorbell, side-by-side with noting that she things the protagonist is an ugly loser who will not be getting any sex. (Similarly, my three-year-old said yesterday: Mommy, I'm building a fort. Mommy, I'm putting blankets on my fort. Mommy, I'm going potty in my fort.)
Omitting saying anything that might hurt someone else was also a "lie" Apparently having good manners and being polite counts, in this film's world, as lying. To us, that seemed like a really, REALLY constricted view of "telling the truth." Did the film makers really intend for truth tellers to behave like toddlers and preschoolers?
Along with this constricted view was also that truth cannot be involved with fictional stories. At one point in order to save his job, the man writes a science fiction screenplay; everyone takes it as historical truth, because the only "story" that can exist in this rarefied world of no-lying is hi-story. This is a strange idea for a number of reasons. First, history is never as "cut-and-dried" as some want to claim. Betsy Ross did not (gasp) sew the first American flag, and yet telling the story of the "fact" that she did is somehow important to American ethos. Historians argue over the best ways to tell their respective stories. Second, it overlooks that poetry and fiction can tell us something true even if they are not the constrictive literal truth portrayed in the film. It isn't clear to me that a world without lying requires a world without poetry and fiction. One would perhaps know the difference between fiction and non-fiction with a bit more clarity than my students sometimes do.
Since the film seems to be so constricted in its view of truth, it also lacks consistency with its main idea, which was making the point that any idea of The Big Man in the Sky is a lie. The film rather clearly was on the side of Big Man in the Sky = lie = stupid, childish idea, but yet it is the truth tellers do not behave like adults. Is it more adult to lie or more adult to tell the truth? Is it better to be constricted or not? It is possible that some of the people involved in making the film wanted the viewers to consider this quite interesting conundrum. But that conundrum gets overtaken rapidly and completely by the film's point that the Big Man in the Sky is just an invention made up by an average guy, and that no one really needs to believe it.
Finally, from a theologian's point of view, the movie is very childlike in its visions of 1) evolution, 2) human life, and 3) God.
1. In this film evolution seemed to "just happen" to a very weak man in dire straits. That does not tend to be a part of most evolutionary theory, though there is quite a bit of interesting work being done in evolutionary biology about the ways in which one's environment affects the ways a being evolves.
2. Human life together involves relationships with other people. The relationships in this film could not be deep because of the too-constricted view of lying. There could be, for example, no sense of compassion for others, even others on the brink of suicide because compassion is a lie, for the film makers. Everything has to be done by sheer will. Except, apparently, romance - for the protagonist is brought together with the Girl, not out of will but out of a concept of love that one would think would also belong to the category of "lies" in this world view. At the film's beginning, people date in order to mate and have children. So what is the deal with this romantic relationship that seems to be based on something other than genetic desire to have genetic offspring?
3. Finally - The Big Man in the Sky does not belong much to a Judeo-Christian view of the world. It doesn't really belong to the views of most other "religions" insofar as I understand them. Granted, there are points in the Bible where God seems to be nothing other than a large anthropomorphic version of ourselves. There are many other places where God is not - God is far more mysterious than the mind can contain. And that complexity is exactly the point in my tradition: God both wants and seeks relationships with humans (and so seems anthropomorphized in the ways that Job anthropomorphizes) but God is also extraordinarily other, so very much NOT the Big Man in the Sky. When Augustine was wrestling with whether or not to become a Christian in the Confessions, part of his wrestling was due to his then-view that God was a Big Man. He later recognized that view to be untrue precisely because it was so problematic and troublesome, as the film also seems to elude. Augustine (5th century) was not the first to wrestle with his addled views about God; many, many others before and since have also come to see that human constructions of God have some degree of falsity. How we can "know" about God has occupied the minds of people far more brilliant and thoughtful than the film's writers; this degree of complexity about the question would make for quite an interesting and thought-provoking show.
All of which is to say, finally, that the film lacks the kind of depth that its title suggests. The questions raised by the film, including the existence of God, are indeed interesting ones to raise, but needed a more engaging worldview than the one so flatly presented. The film does little more than feed into the simple-mindedness of atheisms as displayed by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. For myself, I'd rather be involved in a conversation with an atheism that takes human thinking and living seriously - the atheism of a Karl Marx or a Friederich Nietzsche. So, for giving me the opportunity to think all these things through, I thank the film makers. Imagine what I could do with something of more weighty substance?
"The Invention of Lying" is a film I chose from the Fast Views section of the library - DVDs that are semi-new. I had never heard of the film before, but the premise as described on the back of the box seemed promising. Now that we've seen it (well, admittedly, only about half of it) it has continued to occupy my thoughts as a kind of mind worm, so here we are: my blog's first movie review.
The premise really is rather interesting: a world, very much like ours, but where people do not know how to lie.Then one day, in a moment of desperation because he's about to become homeless, the protagonist develops a sudden capacity (perhaps via evolution? The film hints at this but really doesn't go into depth) to say that he has more money in his bank account than he actually does. He clearly believes it won't work but strangely, it does! The teller believes him and he finds himself able to pay his rent. From there, he goes on to use his new found skill/genetic change to hit on girls and steal loads of money from a casino.
Our protagonist also has a mother who is close to death in a very depressing nursing home. She has a heart attack and, as she lays there dying and afraid to die because she knows there is nothing after death, her son concocts a "lie" telling her how happy and joyful things are when we die, how everyone has a mansion, etc.
Therein lies the crux of the whole film. The doctors and nurses have overheard the son's explanation and believe it; the son's lie makes the news so that people all around the world start wondering at and believing in this alternate life-after-death reality.
This is the part when we turned off the film. I googled the film later and found that Ricky Gervais is an atheist and clearly has an argument he wants to display here, that a happy afterlife can't exist. Apparently (because again, I haven't seen this part of the film and doubtless won't) Gervais' character invents a "Big Man in the Sky" who told him all about this afterlife, which then overtakes peoples' realities and makes them believe in things that don't really exist.
It wasn't actually the life-after-death "lie" that was the major cause of our not finishing the movie. That was just the cherry on top of a number of other fantastical things that happen in the movie. We'd been wondering whether to turn it off prior - so that when we reached the point where it was quite clear that the movie had a bone to pick with "religion" we knew, okay, this really is not a movie we want to continue watching.
The problems, from our points of view as philosopher and theologian, were numerous. First was the way in which truth telling was depicted from the beginning: the characters just feel free to blurt out whatever they are thinking. Telling the truth is more about behaving like my three-year-old, as we got a running commentary on what each character was literally thinking and doing any time they opened their mouths. The female romantic lead talks to the protagonist about the fact that she was masturbating when he rang the doorbell, side-by-side with noting that she things the protagonist is an ugly loser who will not be getting any sex. (Similarly, my three-year-old said yesterday: Mommy, I'm building a fort. Mommy, I'm putting blankets on my fort. Mommy, I'm going potty in my fort.)
Omitting saying anything that might hurt someone else was also a "lie" Apparently having good manners and being polite counts, in this film's world, as lying. To us, that seemed like a really, REALLY constricted view of "telling the truth." Did the film makers really intend for truth tellers to behave like toddlers and preschoolers?
Along with this constricted view was also that truth cannot be involved with fictional stories. At one point in order to save his job, the man writes a science fiction screenplay; everyone takes it as historical truth, because the only "story" that can exist in this rarefied world of no-lying is hi-story. This is a strange idea for a number of reasons. First, history is never as "cut-and-dried" as some want to claim. Betsy Ross did not (gasp) sew the first American flag, and yet telling the story of the "fact" that she did is somehow important to American ethos. Historians argue over the best ways to tell their respective stories. Second, it overlooks that poetry and fiction can tell us something true even if they are not the constrictive literal truth portrayed in the film. It isn't clear to me that a world without lying requires a world without poetry and fiction. One would perhaps know the difference between fiction and non-fiction with a bit more clarity than my students sometimes do.
Since the film seems to be so constricted in its view of truth, it also lacks consistency with its main idea, which was making the point that any idea of The Big Man in the Sky is a lie. The film rather clearly was on the side of Big Man in the Sky = lie = stupid, childish idea, but yet it is the truth tellers do not behave like adults. Is it more adult to lie or more adult to tell the truth? Is it better to be constricted or not? It is possible that some of the people involved in making the film wanted the viewers to consider this quite interesting conundrum. But that conundrum gets overtaken rapidly and completely by the film's point that the Big Man in the Sky is just an invention made up by an average guy, and that no one really needs to believe it.
Finally, from a theologian's point of view, the movie is very childlike in its visions of 1) evolution, 2) human life, and 3) God.
1. In this film evolution seemed to "just happen" to a very weak man in dire straits. That does not tend to be a part of most evolutionary theory, though there is quite a bit of interesting work being done in evolutionary biology about the ways in which one's environment affects the ways a being evolves.
2. Human life together involves relationships with other people. The relationships in this film could not be deep because of the too-constricted view of lying. There could be, for example, no sense of compassion for others, even others on the brink of suicide because compassion is a lie, for the film makers. Everything has to be done by sheer will. Except, apparently, romance - for the protagonist is brought together with the Girl, not out of will but out of a concept of love that one would think would also belong to the category of "lies" in this world view. At the film's beginning, people date in order to mate and have children. So what is the deal with this romantic relationship that seems to be based on something other than genetic desire to have genetic offspring?
3. Finally - The Big Man in the Sky does not belong much to a Judeo-Christian view of the world. It doesn't really belong to the views of most other "religions" insofar as I understand them. Granted, there are points in the Bible where God seems to be nothing other than a large anthropomorphic version of ourselves. There are many other places where God is not - God is far more mysterious than the mind can contain. And that complexity is exactly the point in my tradition: God both wants and seeks relationships with humans (and so seems anthropomorphized in the ways that Job anthropomorphizes) but God is also extraordinarily other, so very much NOT the Big Man in the Sky. When Augustine was wrestling with whether or not to become a Christian in the Confessions, part of his wrestling was due to his then-view that God was a Big Man. He later recognized that view to be untrue precisely because it was so problematic and troublesome, as the film also seems to elude. Augustine (5th century) was not the first to wrestle with his addled views about God; many, many others before and since have also come to see that human constructions of God have some degree of falsity. How we can "know" about God has occupied the minds of people far more brilliant and thoughtful than the film's writers; this degree of complexity about the question would make for quite an interesting and thought-provoking show.
All of which is to say, finally, that the film lacks the kind of depth that its title suggests. The questions raised by the film, including the existence of God, are indeed interesting ones to raise, but needed a more engaging worldview than the one so flatly presented. The film does little more than feed into the simple-mindedness of atheisms as displayed by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. For myself, I'd rather be involved in a conversation with an atheism that takes human thinking and living seriously - the atheism of a Karl Marx or a Friederich Nietzsche. So, for giving me the opportunity to think all these things through, I thank the film makers. Imagine what I could do with something of more weighty substance?
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