The Grace Pages

Not-to-be-missed free DVDs (Brits only)

Make no bones about it, the Daily Mail is Britain's worst newspaper. And I say that as a bit of a lefty who still reads - and enjoys - The Telegraph. But there is good reason to buy the Mail for the next couple weeks. They're giving away a series of 12 great British films, beginning today with Kind Hearts and Coronets.

And on Monday (I think) they'll be giving away Billy Liar, my number one favourite film of all time. If you haven't seen it, don't miss it. The story was a book by Keith Waterhouse, and then a hit stage play co-authored with the late Willis Hall, but for me the defnitive incarnation was in this 1963 film starring Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie.

Other treats include several Ealing comedies: The Man in the White Suit, The Ladykillers and The Titfield Thunderbolt, among others.

The Horror of It All

Anyone with an interest in film, or Hammer horror in particular, can go visit Albion magazine to read my feature-length article The Horror of It All: The Dynamics of Class and Power in the Hammer Gothics.

And don't forget to keep visiting my new blog, RIP: A Blog for Dead Stars. I'm updating it about once a week now with obits of the rich, famous, struggling and not-so-famous, mainly from film and the arts. There'll be an update later today, with several interesting characters to add to the roll of the dear departed.

I believe in judgment

Woody Allen can be a brutally narcissistic and cynical filmmaker at times. Just look at an indulgent, cruel film like Deconstructing Harry (1997), and you'll see what I mean.

At his best, however, his films are tempered by a genuine warmth and a sense of grace. Take Broadway Danny Rose (1983), for instance, probably my personal favourite of all Woody's movies. Danny Rose is a loser, a no-hoper agent with a tendency to latch onto the least talented of acts, and whose heart is usually too big for his own good.

Broadway Danny Rose is a beautiful parable of grace and reconciliation. Talking with Tina (Mia Farrow) over a coffee, Danny (Woody Allen) philosophizes that guilt is good because it stops people doing devastating things to each other. At this stage, Tina's philosophy is 'take what you can get', and pretty much to hell with other people if they get in your way.

But a transformation occurs. Tina does Danny a wrong, and she loses sleep over it. They've spent only an afternoon together, and yet his words have stirred something in her. Having double-crossed him, her conscience is pricked, and she loses all life and vibrancy. Something has melted her cold exterior, and she cannot rest until she seeks out Danny and for forgiveness and friendship. Reconciliation. (Augustine suddenly comes to mind here: "You have made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.")

Even Danny, as big-hearted as he is, finds it too painful to welcome her back at first, but his conscience is awakened, too, and it is time to put his words about forgiveness into action. The movie ends with a warm reconciliation as Tina - having lost her street-smart, worldly-wise veneer - is invited back to Danny's shabby apartment to share a plate of frozen Thanksgiving turkey.

I wonder: Is judgment part of the beauty of reconciliation? Is the pain of being searched and found guilty all part of the wonder of grace, forgiveness and the restoration of friendship with God and with each other? Guilt is, as Danny recognized, a blessing that deters us from hurting each other or, in Tina's case, that provokes us into seeking reconciliation.

Paul says an interesting thing: You have been reconciled to God in Christ - therefore be reconciled (2 Corinthians 5:19). It's a paradox: God has already reconciled us, and yet reconciliation is a future event that requires our response. That response is not the futile effort of arbitrary religious acts, but the simple acceptance of God's offer of friendship. And it is judgment - the painful awareness of having been examined and found guilty - that moves us towards reconciliation.

God has removed every obstacle, loudly proclaiming in Christ that he does not hold any of our wrongs against us, declaring us totally forgiven. Will we wallow in shame or turn around and take his hand?

Christmas pick no 3: Scrooge (1951)

My devastatingly honest verdict on watching this last night for the first time in a few years was that as a film, Scrooge is overrated. You only need to watch what David Lean did with Great Expectations and Oliver Twist to see what a truly great cinematic storyteller can do with Dickens, and director Brian Desmond Hurst (who?) is no match for Lean. It's flatly filmed, with only a few interesting flourishes.

However, there is a big but. A huge but. Alastair Sim cannot be overrated in the role of Scrooge. He is fantastic. He invests the character with all kinds of nuances and quirky mannerisms. He utterly makes Scrooge his own. His transformation at the end of the film had me smiling and laughing as I have at no other Scrooge.

And he is supported by the screen's finest Jacob Marley in the clanking and shrieking Sir Michael Hordern. I also enjoyed Kathleen Harrison's housekeeper, Mrs Dilber, and Mervyn Johns's  Bob Cratchit. The entire ensemble is what really makes this film.

I must confess, however, to having done something that will horrify the purists: I watched the colourized version of the film from 1990. What can I say? It came free with a newspaper last week. The colouring was awful and distracting, but I simply had to watch the film, and it was the only copy at hand. It's definitely time I invested in the DVD of the original black-and-white -- perhaps then I would be more convinced of the film's artistic merits. In the meantime, however, it is well worth watching for the sheer joy elicited by Alastair Sim and the rest of a sterling cast.

Christmas pick no 2: Gremlins

I'd be the first to admit Gremlins (1984) isn't everyone's first choice for a festive movie treat. If you're pretty warped, and with a deliciously dark sense of humour like mine, however, it will be right up there on your Christmas watchlist.

Joe Dante's comedy-horror pays homage to a hundred different movies, including Frank Capra's  It's a Wonderful Life (1946), which you'll be pleased to hear is also to be one of my Christmas picks. The fictional Kingston Falls is itself an homage to Capra's Bedford Falls, with the hero's run to work past the shopfronts of his hometown affectionately reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart's final parade down the streets of Bedford Falls in Wonderful Life. And Mrs Deagle has definite shades of Lionel Barrymore's cantankerous Henry Potter, even if she is mostly Margaret Hamilton aka the Wicked Witch of The Wizard of Oz (1939).

The film is only really about Christmas in a nostalgic, sentimental way. The whole film is a nostalgic, if heavily ironic, tour-de-force, an old-fashioned type of entertainment that celebrates "the way things used to be" -- unsurprisingly, given Dante's obsession with old Hollywood cinema. But it's an obsession I share, and so I heartily enjoy the warm nostalgia and almost primeval form of storytelling on offer here. It's all goodies and baddies, slapstick comedy and pantomime reactions -- but delivered with tongue firmly in cheek.

I suppose one of the reasons this has become such a seasonal favourite for me is because I first saw it at Christmas. It was coming up to New Year sometime in the late '80s, and the venue was the Green Park Hotel in London. My parents were in one room; my sister and I were in the other. After ordering perhaps the world's finest homemade hamburgers ever (room service), we curled up on our beds in front of the TV to watch the movie we were too young to see when it first came out.

Gremlins 2 was out in the early '90s, and by then I was old enough to see it in the theatre, which perhaps took some of the thrill away. It was a slicker, more sophisticated effort, but the studios could never hope to beat the homely appeal of the original.

Christmas pick no 1: Scrooged

One of my favourite things about the Christmas period is the opportunity to set aside sacred time to reflect on the true meaning of the Incarnation of our glorious Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ the chance to get out all those old films you don't get to watch the rest of the year. This year I'm sharing with you some of my top movie picks for the festive season.

My first pick is the 1988 comedy Scrooged. I'd actually place it among the three or four best adaptations of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and there are literally dozens. It was the first of my Christmas DVDs to make it out of the case this year, and I really enjoyed it, despite my enduring memory of the year I watched it in fifteen-minute blocks, since I kept having to go to the bathroom to puke (dodgy fish-and-chip supper that night).

Scrooged updates the famous tale to the '80s, with Bill Murray as selfish TV tycoon Frank Cross. A dictionary definition emblazoned across the wall of his gym reads cross n. a thing you nail people to. Murray plays it deadpan as usual, but manages to put just enough humanity in the character to make it credible. The story follows the basic outline of Dickens's story: Frank is visited by the ghost of his old business partner (a heavily made-up John Forsythe) who warns him to repent, and then receives visits from the spirits of Christmas past, present and future.

It's all very funny, and Murray's dry, tongue-in-cheek style evens out what could easily have descended into a horridly saccharine, sentimental mess.

One of my favourite Christmas albums, by the way, is the late Vince Guaraldi's soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas. I have to make a confession, though -- I was playing it as early as November. It's a crime to let an album that great collect dust!

Close Encounters

I should probably be ashamed to admit I had never seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) before watching it last Saturday.

What a pleasure it turned out to be. For a film with themes of such epic proportions, the tone was nicely subdued, and happily absent the Spielbergian sentimentalism that bogged him down later in his career. I much prefer the early Spielberg seen here and in Jaws (1975) to the later stuff evidenced by ET: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982, a good film, other than the sickly sentimentalism) and (God help us) Jurassic Park (1993).

As I was housesitting for a single night (it should have been for a whole week, but my friend's travel plans were scuppered by visa difficulties), I raided the video collection and watched a few movies I haven't seen before. Se7en (1995) was so-so, but didn't live up to the hype. 28 Days Later (2002) wasn't exactly my cup of tea, but after a slow start it kept me engaged, thanks to a generally interesting and novel approach to an old genre. Peter's Friends (1992) was a blatant British rip-off from The Big Chill (1983), and was badly written (by an American, ironically).

Nouvelle Vague, je t'aime!

Bande a part (1964), otherwise known as Band of Outsiders or sometimes just The Outsiders, was a great film, and I look forward to watching it again. French films of that era (the so-called New Wave) dispensed with many of the established rules of filmmaking, and the result was quirky, edgy films full of spontaneity. My favourite spontaneous moment in Bande a part was when the three main characters decide to dance the Madison in the middle of a Parisian cafe. In an earlier scene they hold a minute's silence for no apparent reason other than to see what it's like (and the soundtrack is entirely silent with them), and later on they joyfully race through the corridors of the Louvre in record time.

But it's not all levity by any stretch. Its main theme is the isolation of and emotional distance between the main characters. That's the thing with these early New Wave films -- they defy genre, and move from comedy to drama all the time. You never know quite where you are, and you have to remind yourself that it's only convention that says a film has to be one thing or the other, that you have to feel one way or the other. With the films of Godard or Truffaut, you never find yourself watching just a comedy, just a crime drama or just a romance. But then, c'est la vie, eh? And la vie is what those films were really about.

It's goodbye from him

Ronnie Barker
1929-2005

 

Weekend waffle

Stephen Green's appearance on the Beeb's Question Time last night did not really justify the uproar I witnessed on some gay forums. There was outrage that the BBC were giving him a platform, but he only ended up making himself look utterly ridiculous, which I'm sure the Beeb knew very well when they asked him to come on the show.

He was quiet for most of the programme, actually, and when he did open his mouth he only made a fool of himself. The rest of the programme was unusually flat by QT standards, I thought.

Onto other things: Despite the overblown title, this is an interesting film about hysterical overreaction to alleged "discrimination" on a few American university campuses; its main virtue is that the tone of the documentary itself is generally not overblown, and it contains some enlightening interviews.

If you're too sore from the last time a Republican whupped your ass to appreciate the documentary, here's some lighter fare: a sneak preview of The Shining (QuickTime required); proof that you probably shouldn't trust movie trailers.

Oh, and here's some parting advice: Think young.