Children of the Corn

Children of the Corn is one among the slew of horror movies derived from Stephen King stories.  Among the King film greats like The Shining, Carrie and 1408, Children of the Corn hangs around the mid to lower end, but it’s not the worst.

The film takes place in Gatlin, a small town in Nebraska, surrounded by corn on the ground and religion on the radio waves.  When a young couple happen upon an accident (or murder?) they go to the nearest town for help.  But the town is deserted, except for a mob of children.

The first two thirds of the film are pretty great; they’re engrossing and creepy. The opening credits with Sarah’s crayon drawings set a wonderful tone.  I love the isolation of our two leads (Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton), and the dried cornstalks everywhere, especially when they appear on the car.  The way the children are all so brainwashed into this crazy religion, believing in “He who walks behind the rows” is fantastic and sadly believable.  Isaac (John Franklin) and Malachai (Courtney Gains) are both forces not to be messed with, and the power struggle between them is truly intriguing.

Yet, the final act is where everything falls apart.  “He who walks behind the rows” is much more menacing and malevolent before any visualization of the creature is present.  And the special effects are laughably awful.  At times, they are nothing more than a cheap animated blob that covers up a character as he or she are killed.  This film needed to stay with what makes Jaws great: what you don’t see is what scares you.

Chilren of the Corn is not a bad movie, but it certainly isn’t great.  It’s enjoyable, memorable, has a decent amount of blood and can scare a younger, more impressionable crowd.  And I personally feel that it is a decent film companion of King’s short story.  Perhaps it is better to grab some friends, some drinks and go all Mystery Science Theater 3000 on it.  There are plenty of great jokes to make along the way.

“Outlander!  We have your woman!”

Amadeus

Most people can name a few key composers; Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, some may toss in Wagner.  However, few people have an interest in classical music.  To make a film about an 18th century composer is almost certain financial destruction, unless it has a rambunctious and saucy energy like Amadeus.  Nearly three hours of powdered wigs and composing symphonies would not be met with happy modern faces, unless Mozart was a man we could love and identify with.  Most viewers will love him, not because of his dedication to finishing his Requiem or his stunning operas, but because he can giggle like a mad man, crawl on the floor after busty women and wear a pink powdered wig like he’s a rock star with true musical genius.

The film, directed by Milos Forman, is told in flashback, narrated by Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), old and confined to an asylum.  All his life, he wanted to be a great composer, “All I ever wanted was to sing to god.”  He works dutifully, sacrificing all other things in his life just to write great music that will make him immortal, but with his keen ear Salieri knows he’s mediocre at best.  Before he meets Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce), he has already heard of his grand reputation.  To his dismay, Salieri first sees this young musical genius giggling, crawling under tables and talking about farting backwards.  Recognizing the grandeur of Mozart’s music, Salieri is filled with envy and rage to see that this “vulgar creature” has such tremendous and natural talent for writing music.  What boils him over is how carefree Mozart can write these amazing symphonies so easily and joyfully.  Salieri then dedicates himself to destroying Mozart’s career.

The kicker to Salieri’s dastardly plot is that Mozart innocently considers Salieri a colleague and friend until the very end.  As he struggles financially, finding pupils to teach and getting his new operas to the stage, he confides in Salieri, respecting his work and opinions in their field.  Of course, the miserable Salieri enjoys this irony and uses it to his advantage, scaring Mozart with images of his domineering father and planning to take credit for his last symphony, his Requiem.

The entire film is visually beautiful in every way.  Some of these shots look like paintings you would find hanging in the Louve with the same furniture you can find there as well.  The lighting is always so rich, giving everything from the large ornate rooms to elaborate wigs and costumes such realism and depth.  And though Mozart’s apartment is modest compared to most of the other scenes, it portrays his personality and lifestyle perfectly.  The place is haphazardly cluttered, with no real thought put into where the furniture has been place.   Hands of cards are left faced up on a table, several wine glasses are scattered about and on the piano.  My favorite detail has to be that Mozart does not use a desk, but does most of his work bent over a pool table, casually rolling a ball as he writes.  The best part is that room does not look large enough to comfortably shoot pool.

Amadeus is one of those rare, stunningly beautiful films that can engage a wide audience in a subject that people normally reserved for high class intellectuals.  It’s almost like feeding the audience healthy vegetables, but they think it’s candy.  This was a joyous treat for my eyes and ears, filled with hearty laughs for my spirit and a compelling narrative for my mind.  Who could have imagined the booming depths of Mozart’s Requiem pairing so well with his giddy laughter?

“Forgive me, Majesty.  I am a vulgar man!  But I assure you, my music is not.”

A Passage to India

“-I’ve scarcely spoken to an Indian since we landed.
-Lucky you!”

It seems most of the English people in A Passage to India have no problem carrying and displaying this disdainful, colonial attitude, holding themselves and their culture at a much higher esteem than anything in India.  Throughout the film we see polite and proper English hold their noses as Indians pass by, enjoy elegant tea parties with a band full of native Indians playing British tunes as they dine and play polo.  To an idle eye just flipping channels, the Indian setting might be completely lost at times due to the heavy English influence.

However, Miss Adela Quested (Judy Davis) and Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft) are itching to see the real India, something their English friends don’t understand or recommend.  Adela is young and adventurous and I believe Mrs. Moore doesn’t want her to be stuck in a life of quiet repression so early.  The fact that Adela is engaged to Mrs. Moore’s stick-in-the-mud son, Ronny (Nigel Havers), the British magistrate, gives both women the silent, but mutual, push to find one final chance at adventure.  India seems to be just the place that can be so full of new discoveries and when Mrs. Moore accidentally meets Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee) there seems to be potential for great intercultural friendships as well.

Aziz is a smart and kind man, who holds the English in very high regard.  After being invited, at Mrs. Moore’s request, to meet Adela with Professor Godbole (Alec Guinness), and English Professor Fielding (James Fox) from the university, Aziz offers to take the ladies to the caves.  It’s simply an enthusiastic gesture of kindness and hospitality, but Aziz realizes he’s not prepared to take English women out on a picnic.

To adequately provide for these women, as he feels he should on such a journey, Aziz gets all his friends to help in providing refreshments, furniture to set up outside the caves and even a painted elephant to take them to the caves.  It’s one extravagant gesture of kindness after another with Aziz to impress these friendly visitors.  But his reward is less than grateful after Adela accuses him of attempted rape.  How do you think a court in a British colony will treat an Indian man under this accusation?

Leading up to the picnic excursion, we watch Adela discover ruins of a temple, complete with erotic statues.  Surely, the young English maiden is shocked by the unbridled images, perhaps she can’t even comprehend them.  From them, we are to believe that she understands a sense of passion about them, something she realizes she will never find from her rigidly pent up fiancé.  This moment of discovery and the accusation of rape are not directly linked, but come about by the new ideas forming in Adela’s mind.

A Passage to India is the last of David Lean’s sprawling epics.  The images he shows us of India are more beautiful than the colonizing British can appreciate.  There’s a mysticism at times that can permeate through the film, and the echoes within those caves can haunt even the most grounded individual.  See this film to find out if Aziz is innocent or not.  Love it for its natural beauty.

“My dear, life rarely gives us what we want at the moment we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually.”

A Soldier’s Story

Analyzing A Soldier’s Story brings me back to my college days where I took a course entitled Black Drama, where we discussed plays by and about African-Americans.  After watching this film, I honestly wished we would have discussed the play it is based off of, Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play.  The work is electric with racial stereotypes and motives that would have sent my class into a week of compelling conversation.

Directed by Norman Jewison, A Soldier’s Story is set up as a murder mystery and reveals to be a portrait of self loathing racism by the end.  On an army base full of black soldiers, led by white officers in 1944 Louisiana, Sergeant Waters (Adolph Caesar) is murdered and an officer from Washington, Captain Davenport (Howard E. Rollins Jr.), is called in to investigate.  The fact that Davenport is black makes all the difference.  No one on the base has ever seen a black officer, bringing a new sense of pride to the black soldiers.  At first, all motives lead to the local Klan or white bigoted officers on base and the idea that he plans on questioning and possibly arresting the racist white men in town  is not settling well.

As he questions the different characters, mostly men from Waters’ troop, we are shown flashbacks that reveal more and more of Waters’ true character.  He was a small, light-skinned black man with a lot of ambition and hatred towards southern black men who, in his perspective, conform to racial stereotypes.  He singles out CJ Memphis (Larry Riley) from his troop, calling him “a clown in blackface” because of his laid-back attitude, southern dialect and bluesy musical talents.  Waters presses his hatred against CJ until he retaliates, which brings serious consequences.

All in all, A Soldier’s Story is a compelling film, but while it’s smart and thought provoking, it seems to be constrained by the idea and structure of a murder-mystery.  What this film is really discovering is an underlying racism within these African-American characters against themselves and the murder-mystery is here just to draw in and keep all races interested.

“Something’s wrong, ain’t it, sir?  I mean, those Klan boys, they can’t stand to see us in these uniforms.  They usually take the stripes and stuff off before they lynch us.”

The Killing Fields

Based on true events in 1970s Cambodia, Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) is a New York Times journalist covering their civil war.  Local Dith Pran (Haing S. Ngor) faithfully helps Schanberg cover the tragic stories of the war.  When the embassies are warned against the Khmer Rouge invading the capital, Pran sends his family to leave with the American troops but he chooses to stay behind with Schanberg and the other journalists, including a photographer played by John Malkovich.  The foreigners will be able to leave, but all the native Cambodians will be forced into labor camps and subject to endure hard labor or execution.  When Schanberg and Pran are split up,Schanberg dedicates his work to finding Pran, earning him awards in journalism.  Pran must just find a way to survive.

This is obviously not a Hollywood film.  Our American hero, Schanberg, doesn’t hold much power and shows little brawn.  After he has to leave Pran behind, he does everything he can to find out his location and get him out of Cambodia.  The extent of his efforts is typing up letters and sending them out with photographs of Pran attached.  These are not the bold American heroics Hollywood would show us, but it is all the real Schanberg could really do.

Since a narrative led by Schanberg back in New York would be pretty boring, the second half of the film switches perspectives.  We see how Pran survives his captors under complete silence and repression under the Khmer Rogue’s Year One policy.  It’s here that the film shines and makes us understand the dire severity of the situation in Cambodia.  The majority of the second half of the film has little dialogue but what is shown explains more than conversation could.  Here, random executions happen all the time and anything that could improve life is destroyed by the children who seem to be systematically brainwashed.  It looks like the leaders of the Khmer Rouge are extinguishing everything about modern civilization and instilling agrarian values into the children.  There is no value for education, religion, family or life outside of mundane manual labor.  The brutality administered by the children, seen to be the future leaders of this new age, can be very disturbing and disheartening.  Part of this new age is to execute anyone who seems to have any formal education, so Pran stays completely silent to make them believe he is simply a peasant.  Being locked up in the embassy was the easy part of Pran’s journey, escaping the labor camp will prove to be a harrowing task.

For his portrayal of Dith Pran, Haing S. Ngor became the second non-professional actor to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.  Ngor also endured being a captive of the Khmer Rouge and escaped.  Many of the scenes in the film were very intense for Ngor, being so similar to the real life horrors he endured.

The Killing Fields is one of those rare films that everyone should see, but most won’t or won’t want to.  For your average film fan, that’s perfectly understandable since this is very un-Hollywood film.  But Cambodia is one of those moments in history that the average American doesn’t know very much about, and that’s a shame.  For any film, history of human rights buff, The Killing Fields should be on your must see list.

“The wind whispers of fear and hate.  The war has killed love.  And those that confess to the Angka are punished, and no one dare ask where they go.  Here, only the silent survive.”

Places in the Heart

In the middle of the depression, Edna (Sally Field) and her family seem to be one of the few lucky people in a small Texas town still living comfortably on a steady income, until her husband is accidentally killed by a drunk black man.  Suddenly, after years of only doing housework and raising kids, Edna must find a way to provide for her two small children and keep the bank from buying the house.  When a wandering black man, Moze (Danny Glover), who can do nothing but beg for work and food in the racist south, suggests that he help Edna turn her land into a cotton farm.  Seeing no other option that can keep her and the kids together, she becomes the face and Moze the know-how to running a cotton farm.  Along the way, Mr. Denby (Lane Smith) from the bank does, what he calls the Christian thing, and gives her his blind brother-in-law, Will (John Malkovich), as a paying tenant in her house.  Edna, Moze and Will become like family through hardships and tragedies to make the cotton farm a success.

One of the first obstacles that Edna and her gang face is a destructive tornado.  These scenes can be heart pounding and suspenseful for even the most seasoned storm chaser in tornado alley.  Between the daughter, Possum (Gennie James) playing alone in an upstairs room where a tree blows the wall in, and the son, Frank (Yankton Hatten), running from school across town with the tornado quickly approaching, we’re scared to think of the fate of Edna’s family.  Thankfully, both Will and Moze have formed an attachment to the kids enough to help ensure their safety, even by putting their own in danger.  The images of the aftermath of the storm are haunting and devastating, for me, they only echo the recent events in Alabama in Missouri.

Basically, the film is a sum of all my worst fears.  Becoming a widow with young kids and no work experience outside the home to make an income off of sounds like one of the worst predicaments I can imagine.  Of course, the time period set in the midst of the depression is just a double whammy.  And then the tornadoes seems like extra icing on the already decked out cake.

Even with all these fears helping me sympathize and identify with Edna and her lovable outcast gang, I didn’t find Places in the Heart to be anything of extra special significance.  I have no real complaints about the film, the acting was great all around and the story kept me intrigued from beginning to end.  Yet, there was just some spark of greatness that I’ve come to expect from most of these Best Picture nominees.  It’s always a little disappointing when just that one last element is missing.

“Peace of God.”