Tennis!

Have I mentioned that I'm a huge professional tennis fan? Well, I finally made it out to Indian Wells this year after eleven years of dreaming about going. Four friends and I just got back from two days in the desert at what I can only think of as "Tennis Woodstock." Thousands of genteel, well-behaved tennis addicts sipping Bloody Mary's instead of smoking pot, and sitting in hushed silence watching young athletes grunt and smack their rackets at neon yellow balls.

It was fabulous.

But most fabulous of all was that I kept getting chances to see my all time favorite tennis player Martina Hingis! Yesterday, we just happened to walk by a practice court on which she was warming up. Then, we got to see her play a good strong second round match, her opponent of sad memory was dispatched nicely. On to round three! Then, we walked in to the grounds today at 12:15 to see a small sign that Martina would be signing autographs. So, I made my way over, and the next thing I knew, I was first in a line that grew hundreds of avid fans deep.

While Martina signed my poster, I thanked her for always working hard, and told her that she was the most fun to watch. She chuckled and smiled. My friend John has it all on his camera....you know, just in case my new friend Martina wants a commemorative photo of what I'm sure was an epoch moment for her...

Here is Martina waiting for serves from warm-up partner.




































Here is new tennis expert and friend Anamaria, in the foreground, with the great Hingis in the background.


























More shots of Martina showing great warm-up form....





































Martina, in between sets of her second round smack down.



























Martina being interviewed by a fawning announcer after her second round victory.
























Martina signing autographs.





































Friends of Barb in between sets at a match with the men's world number two, Rafael Nadal.



























Somewhere down there in the blue and white is Nadal.


























Oh, there he is, serving out of the frame.

The Hall's - Singlehandedly Putting the AMDG in Primetime?

My friend and sometime pilgrimage companion, Karen Hall has good news over at her blog about a TV show she has sold to AMC. Tentatively called "Vows" the show is set in a Jesuit house of formation located on a university campus. Go here to read more.

And, then, I had dinner the other night with the other TV writing Hall in town, Karen's sibling Barbara. Barbara, who was the creator and show runner of the much mourned Joan of Arcadia, has another show about God-stuff that is in the works now for CBS. It's called Demons and is about an ex-Jesuit with an inescapable talent at exoricising everybody else's demons. He has no facility for exorcising his own, which I am sure will make for a good character.

Please keep both Halls and their shows in your prayers. It's hard to put yourself out there when you are just writing basic dramas. When you are writing spiritually themed work, you open yourself up to ten times more attacks from humans, and persecution from principalities and powers just to keep it interesting.

Schedule Update

I am off for another long trip starting Sunday. Here is the most current update of where I will be in the next few months...

March 12-13 -- Huntington College, Ft. Wayne, IN -- I am giving a talk open to the general public at 7pm, March 13. Here is the University's press release with all the info regarding the event.

March 14-17 --Washington, DC -- I don't have any official engagements on my calendar, but I still have room for meetings or soirees if anybody wants to get together. For a good time, email me at BRNicolosi@aol.com.

March 18-21 -- Milan, Italy -- I am principally going to speak for two days to the Film/Mediua students at the Catholic University of Milan. However, my visit coincides with the release of the Italian version of our book Behind the Screen, so the University is supposed to be planning some kind of event open to the general public to promote the book. For info, I guess you can just contact the University? (Armando, if you are out there, perhaps put the info in the comments here?)

March 22-April 4 -- Israel -- !!!!! -- Just being there and praying.

April 4-9 -- Rome, Italy -- Nothing on the agenda but a Holy Week retreat at this point.

I would be grateful for prayers to accompany my trip. Not sure what God is preparing me for with all this pilgimaging, but (to borrow from Pretty Woman) "God, in case I forget to say it after, 'I had a real great time!'"

A Good Next Step

I was asked by a group of Catholic business leaders recently, to give some ideas as to how the Church could make a more strategic impact on the culture. I think everybody expected me to say that the answer is in writing checks to fund movies. But that's not what I said. I don't think we need to get Catholic millionaires to write big checks to pay for movie budgets. I think we need to get Warner Bros., Paramount, Sony and the like to start financing movies that would have a Catholic worldview.

And how do you do that? It's so damn simple I can't believe it has to be said. Still not getting it? The secret to changing what is on the screen is mysteriously connected to the Church carrying out her perpetual mandate. Which is not to start production companies...

Here's a few notes I put together for the business leaders.

________________________

Proposed: Christian Center for the Arts and Media – Hollywood
Submitted by Barbara R. Nicolosi, February 28, 2007


Problem: Pope John Paul II noted with dismay many times, and in particular in his Letter to Artists (2000), that something must be done to “renew the fruitful dialogue that used to exist between the Church and the arts.” There is a great need for the Church to connect to the creative and business communities that are setting the global arts and entertainment agenda. Inspired by the success of The Passion of the Christ, the Lord of the Rings franchise, and the Narnia franchise, many young Catholics are finding their way into Hollywood careers. Programs like Act One, the Angelus Awards, and the Los Angeles Film Study Center exist to help them in their initial steps. There is currently very little to support Christians who are established in the business, who want to stay close to Christ, as well as grow in their professional achievements.

Goal: The Church needs to offer professionals in the entertainment arena:
- ethical guidance
- spiritual formation
- vocational and professional discernment counseling
- state of the art professional and artistic training and mentoring informed by a Catholic worldview
- RCIA geared specifically to media professionals
- A community of peers centered around Christ and the desire to do good

Models: We can look at two different paradigms as a starting point for a way to structure our approach to nurture the presence of the Church amidst the professional entertainment community.

1) The Catholic Information Center, Washington, DC – Located in the heart of the center of government, Opus Dei operates a Catholic bookstore, chapel and center for spiritual direction. The focus of the Center’s activities has been principally to serve the spiritual needs of those who work on Capitol Hill and in the various branches of the Federal government. The Center has an ongoing calendar of spiritual and formational conferences, days of recollections and retreats. The Center has brought in innumerable converts to the Church, including very high-profile converts including Judge Robert Bork and Sen. Sam Brownback.

2) The Church of Scientology – The largest landowner in the Hollywood region, Scientologists operate centers of outreach on every block of Hollywood Blvd from Mann’s Chinese theater to the Pantages Theater. They own screening rooms, conference facilities, celebrity retreat centers, boarding houses, and a myriad of informational centers open to the general public. The Church of Scientology has a monthly calendar of events geared to pull in people in the entertainment industry. Every night of the week they have seminars on subjects like “How to go to an audition,” “Writing a Script that Will Sell,” “Staying Centered in the Frenzied World of Filmmaking,” “Networking for Success;” Their genius is to offer programming that is of professional interest to the Hollywood community, at which they acquire good will and then draw people in more and more.

The Center's Mission: To foster a Christ-centered community in the heart of the entertainment industry in Hollywood to be a source of light and connection for the People of God who are called to be missionary/apostles to the culture.

Vision:

1) An Artists Chapel that would become a place of pilgrimage for everyone who is setting out on a new entertainment/media/arts project. A place of real artistic beauty, the Chapel would be dedicated to God the Creator, the Holy Spirit as the Author of new Epiphanies of Beauty, and to the Angels who are the Patrons of Communications and of the City of Los Angeles. We would decorate it with all the artist saints of the Church: St. Gregory the Great, Bl. Fra Angelico, Ven. Hildegrard of Bingen, Bl. James Alberione, etc. The Chapel would be geared to minister specifically to people in the arts and media world. It would be staffed by priests and religious who spend their time praying for the media when they are not hearing confessions, giving spiritual direction and teaching RCIA to industry converts.

2) A Think-Tank Center of Study on the Church and the Arts – With state of the art conference facilities, a production library and screening rooms, this center would offer the broader entertainment industry a continuous program of topical conferences and seminars on topics like “Human Development and Entertainment,” “The Nature and Power of Beauty,” “Good Comedy and Bad Comedy,” “Marrying Truth-telling and Creative License,” etc. In addition, the center would be a place for scholars in residence who will come from ecclesiastical and other places of higher learning in the Church, to brood, write and think on the theology, spirituality and ethics of man as a creative being.

This Center would also be a source for the secular media which is looking for informed statements from the Church on cultural topics. This Center would have been the one to be on all the networks discussing The Da Vinci Code, and why James Cameron’s documentary is only significant as a sign of the spiritual bankruptcy of our times.

3) A large Theater/Screening Facility – to rival the coolest ones in the city (ie. The TV Academy, the WGA Theater, the DGA theater). From here, the Church can hold film festivals that look at the intersection of cinema and spirituality. We can give prestigious screenings to secular industry projects that are worthy of praise or discussion.

4) A State of the Art Graduate Level Cinema School. Act One is already doing this, but with rented facilities and without the resources to expand the program to offer training and mentoring to actors, directors, and technical professionals. Act One needs a building. It needs a long term financial structure that will allow it to expand without the insane trying to pay the bills month-to-month.

5) A center of ministry - To give a home to the myriad Christian ministries that operate in Los Angeles that are beggars and renters without a permanent home. Ministries that could be brought together under the Center's roof include, LAFSC, the City of Angels Film Festival, Open Call, Catholics in Media Associates, Inter-Mission, the Hollywood Prayer Network, Hollywood Connect, the Actors Co-op, etc.

6) Community Housing – There is a great need for housing for young Christians just arriving in Hollywood, and those who are already here, but who want to live in an environment of prayer and Christ-like fellowship. We need an apartment building with quiet, orderly places for the students to work on scripts, storyboards, audition prep, etc. It will need a Chapel, and quarters for a chaplain. There should be some common areas and maybe a coffee shop operated by the young people who live there, which would be open to the general public. It could be a first place to land and work for young people just arriving in Hollywood.


Strategic Plan:

- Gather a core team to support this right now. Find somebody who is spiritually mature, philosophically trained, experienced in non-profit management and conencted in Hollywood to run it. (Not me...and not anybody who is a religious or priest either. The religious and priests will work at the place but this is innately a LAY initiative. The media is absolutely the temporal sphere. Besides, we don't want to pin our fortunes here on the weird inner workings of a religious community in which people too often get power because they don't rock the boat.) Write the person a big check, and then trust. Over sight yes, but trust. Because most of us orthodox Catholics have no idea of what beautiful art is. We only know what we like. Not what we are talking about, as a rule.)

- The above visions should be phased in gradually over a period of the next five to ten years. The first step would probably be #5 Community Housing, so that we can continue to build a core community to support and utilize the center. #4 Act One/Cinema School is already in place. It just needs a more solid funding base and campus for the future. The Artist’s Chapel and Conference Center would be extensions off the Cinema School Campus, followed by the Screening room.

Question everybody is wondering: Why does this thing have to be interdenominational? Can't it be just Catholic?

This Center has to be interdenominational, because that is how God is working to renew the entertainment industry. It has been an interdenominational effort for the last twenty years. And it is wonderful and working. So, let's all just get over ourselves and let God be God and send His spirit and inspirations through whom he will.

Question: So why do we need a Chapel and priests and religious? Because the Catholic contribution to the fruitfulness of this Center will be in the sacraments. I have seen Christianity from both sides now. And the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and the power of the Eucharist have irreplaceable undeniable power.

Interdenominalationism is not everybody trying to obscure their keynotes in a shakey, temporary alliance. It is a commitment to respect that God is working through whom He will. We all have to be who we are, and then come together in strength. The catholic thing in this Center will be the philosophical and theological depth of the tradition and scholarship, but also, absolutely the sacraments.

Help Act One! Go See The Ultimate Gift

The new film The Ultimate Gift was written by an Act One alumn, Cheryl Mckay, of whom we are very proud. Cheryl sent me the following message about a way people can contribute to Act One when they buy a ticket to the film....

___________________________________________

Hey everyone! This is the week! My film comes out Friday. Thanks for all the notes I received when I announced this a couple weeks ago. I can’t thank all of you enough for spreading the word to your friends and family. It sounds like thousands of people have heard about this film just from you guys. I’m overwhelmed by the volume of support everyone’s shown. Fox Faith decided to add 300 more theaters to our release. And the American Family Association’s President sent out their endorsement this week.

I just have one last announcement.

Before you go to the theater on opening weekend (March 9-11), you can check to see if a theater in your area is participating in giving $1 per ticket to charity. (This charity program is only for the opening weekend.) I set up a charity code for Act One, Inc. the non-profit screenwriting organization that has invested a lot in me as a writer. They have a full faculty of Christian writers, directors and producers who teach people like me how to write and produce films like this one. (Family-friendly, or faith based types of stories, movies that reach a mainstream audience yet still contain good messages etc.)

Go to: http://www.foxfilmfund.com/
Choose The Ultimate Gift and enter your zip code.
If you find a theater in your area, proceed to GET TICKETS NOW.
It will direct you to Fox Faith’s section of Fandago.
Upon check out, you can enter the church/organization code: 500231

To view the new trailer online, visit: http://www.foxfaithmovies.com/theultimategift/
They also put up a new site with behind the scenes footage at:
http://www.buzzplant.com/theultimategift/

Thanks for all the support for this film!
Cheryl McKay
Screenwriter “The Ultimate Gift”

I'm just saying...

Here's an email message I got from a friend today.....

Hey, just read something verrrry interesting. Frank Capra's mother's maiden name was...

Nicolosi.

And they were from Sicily.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence. Bwa-ha-hah...

Act One Info Night in L.A.

Please pass the following information along to anyone you know who is interested in learning more about this year's Writing and Executive Programs.


ACT ONE WRITING FOR HOLLYWOOD INFO NIGHT

Join us for a Q&A session with the staff of the acclaimed Act One Writing Program to learn about Act One's upcoming 2007 Summer Writing Program. The intensive four-week program trains talented Christians for careers in mainstream film and television. Our world-class faculty includes over 50 top-notch TV and movie writers, agents and producers. If you love movies and TV, if you're serious about your faith, and if you're crazy about telling stories, come find out more.

DATE: Wednesday, February 28, 2007

TIME: 8:00-9:00 p.m.

LOCATION: Act One offices, 2690 N. Beachwood Dr., Hollywood, CA 90068

DETAILS: www.actoneprogram.com/writers



HOLLYWOOD INTERNSHIP & EXECUTIVE TRAINING INFO NIGHT

All are welcome to attend this Q&A session to learn about Act One's rigorous 12-week summer program, which prepares and mentors talented Christians for executive careers in mainstream entertainment. Each of the selected candidates is matched with a summer internship at a Hollywood studio, agency, production company, or law firm. The program includes a challenging after-hours curriculum taught by working professionals in Hollywood.

If you have dreams for the big screen and are committed to making a positive cultural impact, come see what the Executive Program is all about!

DATE: Thursday, March 1, 2007

TIME: 8:00-9:00 p.m.

LOCATION: Act One offices, 2690 N. Beachwood Dr., Hollywood, CA 90068

DETAILS: www.actoneprogram.com/ep

If You Like Dreamgirls...

...then, I can say definitely you'll like Dreamgirls.

That is to say, if you like largely non-narrative, Broadway musicals where spectacle is the point, then Dreamgirls will be your best movie of the year. My review of the film largely parallels with Jan's, with perhaps just slightly less enthusiasm. I enjoyed it for the costumes and the fast-paced editing and, in a lesser way, the music.

Which surprised me. I expected a movie based on the story of Motown and The Supremes to have really amazing music. It really didn't. I felt like the movie kept asking me to believe that the songs were great because there were so many shots of people standing in the wings and sitting in the audience clearly enthralled. But the music wasn't that memorable.

It is quite true that Jennifer Hudson stole the spotlight completely off Beyonce, who will probably be in therapy over it for years to come. Where Hudson's portrayal was full of pain and passion, Beyonce's was almost colorless. It seemed like she was completely overwhelmed by her own beautiful look in the movie. Perhaps she was so consciously not to let this role be "just a vehicle for Beyonce" that she ended up playing nothing at all. I didn't think Eddie Murray was that fabulous. And I agree with Jan that Jamie Foxx was either badly directed in this part or really bored. His journey to Judas lurched around from scene to scene and so, I didn't believe either his attractiveness to Effie, nor his love-song to Dena, nor his commitment to Mammon.

From a story standpoint, I was disappointed that they didn't do more with the whole "How Does Someone Who Sets Out to Elevate His People, End Up Betraying Them?" theme. If the writer and director could have found that theme, this movie would have been much more interesting. As it was, me and my companions were a little bored by mid-point (the guys were VERY bored), and we finally just told each other to sit back and just enjoy the look and sound of the movie.

There isn't anything particularly objectionable in the film. The filmmakers here were clearly keeping this open to as wide an audience as possible.

I didn't find this film as interesting nor as enjoyable as Chicago. Mostly because of the thematic strength of that piece. And because the music was so much better. So, I wouldn't give this one an Oscar in a normal year. This year, where the pickins are so slim, who knows?

I am special! Lucky seven...

I loved this. Hat-tip to Justine.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 7 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

sPAiN'S Labyrinth

So many questions came to mind during my screening of this film...

Question #1.... What is this movie about?

I had no idea going in. I thought it was a Mexican fairytale. It isn't. It isn't quite a fantasy story because half of it is dripping in brutal realistic violence. So, genre-wise, this film is half child's fantasy and half R-rated period war drama.

Pan's Labyrinth is the story of a lost princess from the underworld who has been apparently reincarnated several times as a human until she is finally reborn into a little girl, Ofelia, who lives in Spain at the end of the Civil War. Blood, blood, blodd. Ofelia's God of the underworld father has finally found her and for a reason that is never really explained, now needs her to complete some tasks before he takes her back to the underworld. Ofelia's task is complicated by the fact that her human mother has married the worst most evil man on the planet, who happens to be a Captain on the Nationalist side of the War. And one of his friends is a complacent priest. Torture, murder, abuse. One of Franco's minions, the captain spends the whole movie killing and torturing and abusing everybody else. Pretty much everybody dies. The movie sets up a group of perfectly pure and good leftist guerillas with whom Ofelia develops a connection. Ofelia is sent on two terrifying and repulsive quests, until she is challenged to give her life to save her baby brother. And at the end, the good forces of marxism conquer the evil forces of Franco (and the Church!). But Ofelia doesn't live happily ever after, exactly.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have a movie set during the Spanish Civil War that seems like it is going ahead. I tried to be fair in my movie showing evil on both sides of the conflict. I suppose that knowing the truth about the period probably ruined my enjoyment of Pan's Labyrinth which requires you to just go with the notion that all virtue in the struggle was on one side.

So, know that Pan's Labyrinth is at one level a two hour leftist political fantasy. (I'm not sure what it is at the other level.) If you can't find it playing near you, go rent a copy of Eisenstein's October for a similar,and certainly more coherent rush.


Question #2....Please, somebody tell me, what is all the raving about? Let's be serious for a moment and look at this film for what it is. Really, not that good.

The principle strength of the film is the look of it. Some of the frames were quite interesting. I wouldn't say beautiful, but definitely interestingly composed. With the possible exception of the labyrinth itself there was almost no symbolic imagery in the film, so you don't get the added points of depth of meaning to make the images resonate even more. And if the labyrinth was supposed to be an image - it seems too contrived an object not to be - then it was startlingly UNdeveloped in the story.

Another comment about the look of the film was what I like to call really well-drawn visual ugliness. I found this to be true in the LOTR movies too. You know, that's where the orcs look really, really disgusting? Well, Pan's has lots of that kind of thing in the fantasy sequences. In fact, all of the fantasy moments are outstanding in their effective realization of repulsiveness. So, the film gets points for good-looking gruesomeness....if that's your thing. Not sure it's Jesus'. Have to check...

Pan's two stories are a mess. Even understanding that it is half-fantasy film (and half starry-eyed leftist romanticism), thiings happen not by necessity but because the storyteller needs them to happen. The inciting incident happens as a damn coincidence in which Ofelia's mother JUST HAPPENS" to get sick and stop the car on the side of the road near which one of the underworld fairies JUST HAPPENS to be waiting. And then Ofelia JUST HAPPENS to step on some kid of magic stone. And while her adult escort JUST HAPPENS to be distracted ends up JUST HAPPENING to stumble over the magic obelisk in the woods.

Several of the principle "plot points" (and I use the term loosely, but this is a European/foreign film - Spain/Mexico - so we are supposed to be grateful if there are ANY discernible plot points...) had me slapping my forehead saying, "Oh please." The A-story, being the fantasy stuff, bears no necessary relationship to the B-story, that is, the political propaganda story. That kind of disconnect is usually the definition of bad, agenda-driven storytelling. But for some reason, the critics are giving this film a pass on the limits of its narrative.

Then, there is the BIZARRE mixing of genres which, also, everybody usually agrees defines a narrative mess. When I heard that this film was "fresh," I didn't realize "fresh" here meant mixing fauns and fairies and little girl's humming lullabyes with close ups of torture and gun shots to the head and, lots of one-sided leftist romanticizing. Talk about "one of these things is not like the others"! This whole film is a clinic in narrative and thematic confusion...and agenda driven filmmaking.

Let's keep going on the technical problems.

The script, even apart from the story being a mess, was a few limps shy of being purely pedestrian. The dialogue was banal. There were no real clever moments. There were no paradoxical choices. There was nothing insightful in the theme. The theme here seems to be "People who aren't us (we're leftists) are evil." Not exactly universally compelling. More like the stuff for which I am always nailing Christian films. Only, you know, rightwards.

Pan's characters are developed according to the easiest most cliched methods starting with "the audience will like her because she is a cute, innocent looking little girl" to "let's establish the villain by having him shoot somebody in cold blood as a lark." The characters make choice after unmotivated choice, starting with the little girl lead who does some incrediblely un-little girlish things which I never bought. Just because she reads a lot of books we're supposed to conclude that she doesn't mind golfball size maggots crawling all over her? Uh-huh.

The actors were poorly directed. Unless of course, your model for acting is "1920's Soviet valentines to socialism" films. I thought to myself as I was watching, "Hmmm, the last time I saw this much earnest purity on the good guy side, and hypocritical cruelty on the bad guy side was when they made us watch all those boring Soviet propaganda films in film school." (Heck. And I thought watching those films was a waste...)

I could go on, but what's the use? People seem to have decided to laud this silly, easy film as brilliant, with all of its problems being called "fresh". It ain't fresh. It's "important"!!!

Question #3... Did Spain learn NOTHING at all from its tragic, terrible, hellish Civil War?

The answer, from watching Pan's Labyrinth is an emphatic "No." Sixty years later, this film sets the clock back to one-sided pillorying of the other side. Portrayals of "the other guys" as corrupt, barbaric, hypocritical, conniving and without the least humanizing quality is what got Spain into the Civil War in the first place. And then, the film borrows completely from the leftist mythology which is getting replayed in Spain today that the Church was in sympathy with Franco's attrocities.

My thinking is, it's never going to help a social debate to put all evil on the other guy's side. America is wallowing in radical polarization because it's been 150 years since we ended up killing each other in Civiil War. Spain has really no excuse for this kind of short-term memory lapse.

Question #4... Is it that Europeans can't tell a coherent narrative, or that they won't?

Hollywood takes its cue in narrative principles from Aristotle. Europe, in rebelling against Hollywood-style filmmaking, has had to rebel against Aristotle's Poetics. This is bad for their movies.

I sat there watching Pan's ridiculous lurching around from one story to the other without any attention to what the audience needs in storytelling, and wondered how it was that the folks who produced some of the greatest novelists ever, can't seem to pull off a begining, middle and end connected by necessity.

I'm thinking that after centuries of Aesop and Brothers Grimm and national folk tales and Arthurian legends, the Europeans are just plain old sick of a good story. And how's that working for you, Old World?

Question #5... Why are so many Americans raving about this film? (and the corollary) Why are so many Christian Americans raving about this film?

Americans are raving about this film because its leftist message puts in in that genre of "important" film. If a film is "important" in Hollywood, then all of its technical sins are forgiven. Americans are also raving about this film because Hollywood has a deep-seated inferiority complex towards Europeans, that they know about art and we don't. So, when a European makes a halfway coherent story (and Pan's is definitely coherent. It's just puerile...) the Los Angeles film industry falls allover itself to be on the side of "brave" "amazing" "artistic vision." The fact that the movie is kind of, um, dull, mustn't be spoken.

And the Christians? I dunno. Maybe it's that longing to be hip thing? Jump on the edgy-bandwagon when we can syndrome? Christian critics are giving it a pass because it's got a "new" look, even though that newness is the old definition of bad filmmaking in Hollywood. And even despite the fact that the film caricatures and scapegoats the humans who are serving as villains. And even though the film uses graphic, desensitizing brutality. And even though the film takes an unfair swipe at the Church. And even though the strongest point in the film is in making some really ugly creatures. And even though there really isn't that much here, here in terms of ideas.

One Christian friend told me the film was "a really bold, different creative vision." Yeah, but Xanadu was "bold and different too.

Question #6....Should people see this film?

It depends. Do you care about seeing a movie that is an gross mythology of one of the most tragic Wars in the 20th Century? You will see a whole bunch of people shot in the head. You will see several people bloodied by torture. You will see a child shot in the stomach. You will see a woman shove a knife in a man's mouth and then slash his face in half. You will see a piles of bloody rags from a woman dying in childbirth.

As all the critics are saying, "It's magical!"

Hah! Pass. And say a prayer for Spain.

Coming from a land Down Under....

I'm still a little brain-fogged from the long trip back from Australia last weekend.

I have so many things I am dying to blog about (...how considering the competition, Apocalypto should have gotten an Oscar nom ...why we are going to see a lot more movies like The Fountain which is an exhausting prospect...the difference between Last King of Scotland and Hotel Rwanda... how the Oscars are grimly and trenchantly embracing their own future irrelevance... Why The Nativity will not undo The Passion effect in Hollywood... Origin Entertainment, the production entity at which I am a partner...The 13th Day - the movie on Fatima I worked on in Australia...What I saw in Australia living in Asiatown, working with Brits and Irishmen on a fiolm shot in Portugal...My movie The Work getting shot this fall with a cool director who it probably isn't up to me to name here... My thoughts on the script Myriam which I worked on as the co-writer for many months... the Jane Austen adaptation I am working on now and how smug I am about the cool and clever way it is structured - think chukkers not acts - but I say , nothing, nothing!...The thrilling prospect of starting work adapting A Severe Mercy for the screen - just acquired for me by Origin.... My upcoming pilgrimage to Israel, why, how and with whom...) but I have no time to blog!

I have to deliver a first draft of the Austen project mid-February. It's coming along well, but you're never done, regardless of how much time you have. I'm also still doing rewrite work on the Fatima movie remotely. And then there is that book proposal TJ worked so hard on last fall which is still waiting to get tweaked. And then there is the stage play adaptation of the Emily movie (recently picked up by a production company) which is about half done.

I have to be on EWTN on Feb. 23rd to talk about the Osacrs with Raymond, so I will have to see all the nominated films. And, if any of them get to me emotionally enough, you know I will certainly have something more to say about those.

So, stay tuned here for as much of the above as I can work in in the next few weeks. I'm not traveling for a whole month, so I have no excuse to not blog a bit (except, you know, House, and Lost and Heroes and Iron Chef...)

G'day for now!

Act One Now Accepting Applications for 2007

Here's a request to help get the word out....

------------------------------------------------

Applications for the 2007 Act One Executive Program and the Act One Summer Writing Program are now available online and we’re asking for your help to get the word out.

The success of the Act One programs depends on the quality of our students, and every year the most effective method of getting news about Act One to high-quality applicants is word of mouth. We're not looking for anything special.... just about fifty smart, talented, culturally savvy Christians who are serious about their faith and who love movies and television. If you know somebody to whom we should send a brochure or an informational email, let us know at info@actoneprogram.com.

The Act One Executive Program will take place from June 9 through August 24, 2007. The application deadline is March 10. All applications received after the deadline will be considered on a space available basis only.

The Act One Summer Writing Program will run from July 6 through August 4, 2007. Applications must be received by March 31.

Applications are available online at www.actoneprogram.com.

January 22nd, Again.

Will I live to see this day as a shameful memory instead of an ever-present horror? I hate and dread this day.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident..."

That's the problem here, isn't it? We're talking about self-evident truth. Of course the thing a person is pregnant with is a person. What else would it be? I remember in Freshman philosophy brooding over the principle that the one thing of which a person cannot be convinced is a self-evident truth. Because cleaving to it isn't a matter of reason but of the will.

"...that all men are created equal..."

So weirdly prescient that the forefathers wrote "created" and not "born". Maybe not weird. The truth is, that men aren't born equal. We are born into privelege or tribulation. But what matters is that we all start as sacred. We are created sacred. It's the foundational belief that underlies everything else Americans believe. The Bill of Rights can be understood as "rules for how sacred beings should be treated."

"...endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life..."

Again, isn't it weird that they stipulated the right to life as the first right of these beings that are created sacred? It's so chillingly self-condemnatory that we Americans have had to ignore that particular flavor of language to have our abortion. We aren't just selfish like other aborting nations. We're hypocritical too.

Lincoln said slavery wouldn't end until a drop of blood had been shed in sacrifice for every drop of blood that had been exacted under the slaveholder's lash.

Lord, have mercy.

Holy Week in Rome?

It looks like I will be leaving Israel on the Wednesday before Easter. I generally go on retreat Holy Thursday through Easter, and as it is the center of my year, I don't want to make it jet-lagged here in Los Angeles.

I am wondering if anybody out there could direct me to a place in Rome where there will be an English retreat and services I could attend. I am also considering spending Holy Week in Fatima, but I can't figure out how to figure out if they are having anything in English there.

If anybody can make any suggestions, I would be very grateful.

Here's the Full Text...

...of an Interview I did with the Spokane Spokesman-Review. Because I was in Australia, we did the interview by email, which meant I ended up writing lots more than will ever end up in the paper. So, why waste it? Here it is...

_______________________________________________


Q: Why did you get into the movie business?
A: I always think of myself as a writer first and a movie person second. Flannery O’Connor said there is really only one answer to why anyone works professionally as a writer – because you’re good at it. I am a good writer and I am someone who gets bored quickly. So movie writing is a great fit for me. It is a very challenging kind of writing because it is so multi-leveled. And most projects are of short duration, so, you move on just when you are getting bored.

I love a great movie – one that is a harmony of harmonies, in which each of a movie’s many art forms are executed well and then married with the others in a complementary way – and all serving a great theme. That’s why I work in the movie business. My driving hope is that I might at some point work on a project that will be inspiring to people. Something that will last.

Q: Who told you that you are a good writer? Seriously though, how does someone know if they should move to Hollywood and throw their hat in the ring?

A: It’s a great question that I have spent a lot of time thinking on because I have worked with so many young writers. My day job for the last eight years has been running Act One, a mentoring and training program for Christian screenwriters and entertainment executives (www.actoneprogram.com).

Talent shows up early. It’s a sign you have them. I won my first writing award in the fourth grade and after that gradually became the designated writer in every arena in which I found myself. As a young person, I had to be pushed into sports which I found very dull. What I wanted to do was be home memorizing Paul Revere’s Ride, by Longfellow – which many of my friends thought was really dull! People are always telling me they want to be writers but they don’t show any particular love for language. Emily Dickinson described writing as a romance with words. She used to sit in a corner reading the dictionary like it was a novel. And then, writers are people who care about the meaning of things. They are drawn to story as a medium to wrestle with ideas. They have something to say about which they are passionate, and they earn a hearing because of the way they are able to frame it.

Secondly, I grew up in a family with a great appreciation for the arts. One of my sisters is a musician and a painter, another is an opera singer, another is a drama coach. We’re all writers. When we were little, my parents introduced us to great movies as the principle art form of our time. My father’s theory was that if you exposed children to beautiful things, they would lose their taste for barbarism. So, my folks made an effort to watch great films with us. On Saturdays mornings, I watched Laurel and Hardy and Chaplain with Dad as much as kiddie cartoons. As a teenager, when all my friends were watching Animal House and Halloween, I was watching Giant and Gone With the Wind and Dr. Zhivago and Rear Window - and so many more!


Q: How would you describe your religious beliefs? Liberal or conservative?
A: I am a Catholic. A happy one. Which means I cleave to the teachings of the Church that have carried us through two thousand years of basically being mercy, light and consolation in the world of men. There have been evil hypocritical Christians, of course, but I’m talking less about the good projects vs. the bad projects that Christians have done in history, and more about the resonance and power that the Person of Jesus has been for hundreds of millions of people down through the ages. It seems to me that no story just made up by people could have proved so compelling for so many for so long.

Does that make me a liberal or a conservative?

Religion is a response to a call that echoes in your heart. If you don’t hear it anymore it is because you have perverted your nature. Plato – hardly a puppet of the Christian Right! - noted that human beings have an instinct for immortality and eternity. That people feel the tug of life after death isn’t a plot by the Pope to get us to put money in the collection basket. It is who we are. Self-destruction is running from that nagging echo.

Q: Is there such a thing as the Christian audience?
A: Is there a gay audience? Is there a Latino audience? Why don’t you ask the folks who made The Lord of the Rings, Narnia and The Passion of the Christ? I would say Hollywood thinks there is, and that is why you are talking to me now, isn’t it?

The real question is whether things that will appeal to Christian audiences will have anything to offer non-Christians. I would answer this with another question. Are the throngs of people who line up in Rome to see the Pieta all just Christians? Are the folks who wait in line half a day to see the Sistine Chapel just Christians? Why do they come? When Hollywood, and particularly the Christians in Hollywood figure this out, it will be very good for the world!

Q: What does Hollywood have to offer the Christian audience?
A: Not much right now, for a lot of reasons. But mainly because the art they are making for that audience is coming from people who aren’t believers. It’s a kind of arrogance that the industry doesn’t practice in crafting product for any other group. They wouldn’t dare make a move for the black audience that wasn’t written and directed by black filmmakers. Or could you imagine a hospital show in which no doctors were consulted? But they will continually craft TV shows like Book of Daniel and Revelation and movies like Constantine and Kingdom of Heaven which are all about Christians, and yet no happy Christian was involved in the production process. There is a snotty influential crowd in Hollywood that doesn’t want to work with Christians because they think they know how we vote politically.

I am hoping that the industry learned a lot recently when The Nativity bombed. That film was a superficial take on the defining mystery of Western Civilization – the Incarnation of God as man. Basically turning this story into a series of Christmas card tableaus was insulting to the people who know the story, and irrelevant to those who don’t.

My father is a military historian, and he raised us with the adage, “It is never good strategy to underestimate your adversary.” So, Hollywood needs to stop looking down on the people who want the transcendent side of human nature to be reflected in their stories. Hollywood needs to stop thinking they can throw cheap platitudes at the people who are, you know, brooding over Leviticus and Dorothy Sayers and Chesterton and C.S. Lewis and John Paul II in their free time. How did Aretha Franklin put it? R-E-S-P-E-C-T! But it’s very hard to respect people if you loathe and fear what they believe.

The word now is that FOX is going to greenlight ten movies for the Christian audience at a cost of about $40 million. Well, in a day in which the average studio movie costs close to $50 million, that means that FOX has decided that the Christians can be had on the cheap. Ask a woman how she feels about a guy who thinks he can win her on the cheap…

But I don’t really blame the industry. People tend to make the movies they want to see. I blame Christians for losing the love of the arts and for not being a serious presence creatively in Hollywood. The Church used to be the Patron of the Arts. Now, our Sunday Masses can mostly be reckoned aesthetic horror shows – terrible music badly performed, lame homilies with no point or oratorical style, environments which are a celebration of the sterile and talentless. It isn’t fair for Christians to critique Hollywood serverely until we get our own aesthetic act together.

Q: Do films like Left Behind and Facing the Giants work for the crowds that flocked to The Passion of the Christ?
A: Clearly not. There is no mystery to the answer why. One of those projects was great art. The others were crap.

Q: Do you approach the craft of screenwriting as a Christian or as an artist first?
A: That’s one of those trick questions like, “So when did you stop beating your wife?” It is stipulating a false dichotomy in which being an artist is one compulsion and being a Christian is another one and that they are somehow struggling against each other. You are assuming that dogma makes truth-telling impossible. I think it makes it essential.

I can’t step outside of the effects of my baptism, nor outside of my talents. I am an artist who was baptized and I bring both things to everything I do. The kinds of stories that intrigue me build on where I come from, what I have read and brooded over. But as a professional screenwriter, I am also very aware that a story has to have mass appeal if it is going to be worth spending millions of dollars to realize it as a movie. My Christianity has a lot to do with my desire to make stories that would help the audience experience the depth of their humanity – to aspire to not just live like beasts scratching and burping, but to aspire to heroic choices, to deep attentiveness, to yearn to be everything that God willed for us when He thought us up.

Q: How tolerant are you of films that offer up a distinctly anti-Christian view? South Park for example…
]A: The question undermines itself. An anti-Christian view is, by definition, prejudice, isn’t it? Are we supposed to be tolerant of prejudice? If you are asking me do people have a legal right to say prejudiced things, I guess they do. Although it seems like if you say bad things about one group you are practicing hate speech, but if you say something hateful about Christians you are being courageous.

Anyway, I haven’t seen South Park so I can’t comment specifically on it. I see one-sided, sneering satire to be unhealthy for the society regardless of what agenda it carries. I also consider it bad art as agenda tends to crush the freedom that makes creativity surprising and fresh. I am as “tolerant” of bad art as I am of bad cooking. People have a legal right to do it. But it is sickening to serve up bad food to people and rather unkind to put your own urge to express yourself over everybody else’s poor stomachs.

I think the Church brings a refreshing voice to the entertainment industry which is floundering around trying to decide if it should have an ethics. The Church says, “Wherever there is power there must be ethics.” Ethics is helping people ask, “Just because I can do something, does that mean I should?”

So, if you look at the culture today, there are many infections out there that I would rather not contract. Radical cynicism, sexual degradation, horrific cruelty -these are kinds of disturbing evils that most people would never encounter, except that they are shoveled at them on the screen. Maybe they aren’t ready to have these images imprinted on their spirits. Maybe their life would never have taken them to the kinds of hells that filmmakers routinely put into their movies – just to get the kudos of the industry which mistakes outrageousness too often for courage. My question to the filmmakers who want to sneer at and debunk everything beautiful is, just because you have lost your hope and faith, does that mean you have to be busy about trashing mine? Just because you have lost your own innocence, does that mean it is a socially responsible thing to destroy mine?

Many films today offer some small goods of insight to the audience. But, the insights are cloaked in so much depraved barbarity that the teeny good of the content is not worth the sliming journey of its method. I am someone who actually believes that there is a place for decorum and graciousness in human society. Many of the movies out there today are just way to full of things that fall into the realm of what St. Paul meant when he said, “There are some things that should never be mentioned among you.” In my mind, there are some shameful things which should be the fodder for prayer and sacrifice, but should never be served up with popcorn as entertainment. Beyond just perversions like bestiality, which is getting a few screenings at Sundance this year, this means things that are just crass and purely voyeuristic and degrading.

Movies like this are “Little Children” and “Little Miss Sunshine.” They have something good to say, but they violate your innocence and defile you so much on the way that it just isn’t worth it. It is like if you told me you have a headache, and I said, “Oh, well I know where there is an aspirin for you! You just have to walk through a putrid sewer for a few miles to get it.” So, on the way to curing your headache, you pick up diptheria and typhoid. Peachy. Thanks for that.

About that transition...

Here's the Act One Press Release...

_____________________________________________

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 15, 2006

------ ACT ONE FOUNDER ELECTED BOARD CHAIRMAN -----------

HOLLYWOOD, CA - Act One, Inc., is pleased to announce that Barbara Nicolosi has been named Chairman of the Board for the organization. Ms. Nicolosi accepted the position at the request of the Board of Directors during their December meeting.

Nicolosi, a screenwriter and former Hollywood development executive, founded the nonprofit training and mentorship program for entertainment industry writers and business executives in 1999, and served as its Executive Director until October of this year. Thomas Deason, a former member of the Alaska Airlines management team and a 2005 graduate of the Act One Executive Program, currently helms the organization.

“After nearly eight years at Act One, I am excited to be moving on to new personal and professional challenges,” says Nicolosi. “I believe our organization’s biggest successes lie ahead, and I am honored to have the opportunity to continue to serve and influence it as it grows.”

Nicolosi replaces outgoing Board Chairman Charles Slocum, Assistant Executive Director of the Writers Guild of America, West, who has assumed the role of Vice Chairman.

-------------------- end ----------------------

Additional Information/Media Inquiries
323-464-0815

See Barb at Gonzaga

Here is the University's Press Release:

__________________________________

BARBARA NICOLOSI TO SPEAK AT GONZAGA UNIVERSITY JAN. 23 ON 'WHY MOVIES MATTER'


The Bellarmine Lecture Series at Gonzaga University will present a lecture by Barbara Nicolosi entitled, "Why Movies Matter: A Pastoral Approach to Hollywood" to begin at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Jan. 23 in the Barbieri Courtroom at Gonzaga University School of Law.

Nicolosi is the founder and Chariman of the Board of Act One, Inc., an interdenominational training program that prepares Christians for professional careers in mainstream film and television. Nicolosi received a master's degree in film and television from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., after she left the Daughters of St. Paul, where she had been preparing to become a nun. Since graduating, Nicolosi has been a Hollywood director of development, a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, and a consultant on many film and TV projects.

She recently wrote the full-length feature, The Work for IMMI Pictures of Beverly Hills and is currently writing a contemporary resetting of Jane Austen's Persuasion for an L.A. production company. She co-edited the 2005 book "Behind the Screen: Hollywood Insiders on Faith, Film, and Culture" from Baker Books.

Nicolosi serves as an adjunct professor of screenwriting and also theology at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, Calif., and the Los Angeles Film Study Center, in Los Angeles, CA and serves on the faculty of Act One, Inc. She and keeps a regular online journal at http://churchofthemasses.blogspot.com/ in which she critiques movies and writes about her experiences as a Christian living in Hollywood.

For more information about the event, contact GU philosophy Associate Professor Douglas Kries by phone at (509) 323-6720 or via e-mail at kries@gem.gonzaga.edu. To learn more about Act One, Inc., visit the Act One Web site at www.actoneprogram.com .

The Best Thing I Saw at Sundance Last Year Was...

: 'God Grew Tired of Us'

Catch a glimpse of this documentary, narrated by Nicole Kidman, about the Lost Boys of Sudan.


God Grew Tired of Us


“God Grew Tired Of Us" tells the story of three of the "Lost Boys" of Sudan--a group of 25,000 children, ages 3 to 13, who fled the famine and war in their villages, traveled together for five years, and eventually made it to a United Nations refugee camp. Nearly 4,000 of them--including the three profiled in "God Grew Tired Of Us"--later settled in the United States, where they built active and fulfilling new lives but remain deeply committed to helping the friends and family they have left behind. The film follows the three as they journey to America and are faced with its unfamiliar ways. Even a trip to the supermarket, with its endless array of choices, is baffling to them.

The documentary is narrated by Nicole Kidman, and its producers include Brad Pitt. Presented by Newmarket Films, "God Grew Tired Of Us" is a National Geographic Films/LBS Production. It opens in New York and Los Angeles on Jan. 12, and moves to wider release on Jan. 19.

Happy New Year...Now, Off to Australia!

Hi everybody! I wish you all every blessing in this coming year.

I have been mostly in hiding these last few months. Enjoying my family in CT, working on a screenplay assignment, consulting on several movie projects and playing way too many games of computer Scrabble. Also Railroad Tycoon. Basically I am transitioning off of eight years running Act One, and am looking forward to helping it continue to grow in my new role as Chairman of the Board.

I haven't been watching a lot of movies. I am way behind in being able to disdain with authority the movies that the industry is preparing to lavish with Golden Globes and Oscars. My only definitive picks so far would be for Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep to walk home with statues. And probably Todd Fields for Little Children. I did enjoy Rocky Balboa and found The Fountain an intriguing visual poem (which is a mess under a merely narrative lens the way poems usually are). I have been smugly watching The Nativity flounder, and even more smugly watching the crowds throng to and the critics rave about Apocalypto.

2007 looks to be a year of much - how does Job put it about Satan? - wnadering around the face of the earth. I leave for two weeks in Melbourne, Australia tonight (Jack Dwyer - if you live in Melbourne, we should have tea! Also, if Claire M. is reading this, send me an email!). I will be consulting on a very interesting movie project that will be of interest to people of faith. More I cannot say right now.

Other trips on the calendar so far include...

January 23 - speech at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA

January 26 - a really kind of cool but not public speech in Washington, DC

February 27 - Legatus, Houma, LA

February 28 - Legatus, Mobile AL

March 1 - Franciscan University of Steubenville, OH

March 3 - University of Notre Dame, IN

March 14 - The University, Thousand Oaks, CA

March 21 - April 4 - The HOLY LAND, baby! My mother and family are horrified that I am going to Israel right now. But I figure, if you die on a pilgriamge to Jesus' places, you win!)

April 5 (date still TBD) - Catholic University of Milan, Italy

May 15 - Legatus, Fairfield, CT

May 16 - Legatus, LeHigh Valley, PA

May 17 - Legatus, Morris County, NJ

August 4 - Catholic Family Conference, Wichita, KS

September 5 - Legatus, Colorado Springs, CO

November 8 - Legatus, Ft. Worth, TX

I know I am missing a few more on that list. Oh well.

And did I mention that my New Year's Resolution is to cut down on traveling? Rats.

Anyway, if you have a group, college or parish in any of these places and would like to set up a speech, now is the time to get on the calendar. Just send me an email at brnicolosi@aol.com.

What Writers Do Instead of Writing

I am back in L.A. supposed to be working on writing projects today. Which is, of course, why I am taking Internet quizzes. This one was fun and pretty true. I was born in NJ and learned to talk there. Moved to RI when I was five, too late to acquire the Go-ad in heaven, wicket biz-ah way of talkin' that my de-ah sistahs have.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
The Inland North
The Northeast
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Act One in the News

Here's a nice piece about Act One that just ran in the Houston Chronicle this past weekend. I had a speech at St. Thomas University there, and the university kindly set up this interview. Here's my favorite snip...

"The goal of Christians in the arts is not to make stuff that is only for Christians," Nicolosi said. "The role of Christians in a secular world like Hollywood is to say there is beauty, and people long for it. There is truth. There is goodness."

She's is critical of films like this summer's church-produced Facing the Giants that extol acceptance of Christ as the solution to life's problems.

[NOTE FROM BARB: Something must have gotten lost here in my rambling in the interview. Just to be clear, Jesus IS the answer to life's problems. And this answer is not that we have no problems, but that loving Him means suffering without despair in a way that is saving for the world...I'd so much rather people get furious with me for what I did mean that for what I didn't.]

She wants writers to produce scripts like A Man for All Seasons, Ghandi, Chariots of Fire or Schindler's List. "Those kinds of films will be part of the dialogue for the ... human family, about things that are lasting, about human meaning," she said.

After the blockbuster success of The Passion of the Christ, Act One began receiving calls from studios looking for writers and executives, Nicolosi said. But she warns that Hollywood still does not understand the religious market or respect traditional morality or ethics.

"Let's face it, no one is writing a To Kill a Mockingbird anymore. That would require a letting go of the cynicism that has Hollywood in its grip. For Hollywood, there can be no heroes." But Nicolosi is also critical of the Christian community for supporting poorly made films simply because they are "Christian."

The religious community should accept that great dramas often involve evil and violence, she said. "We have to be able to talk about sin, and Christians should be comfortable with that," she said. "We have to have sin in our drama, but it doesn't have to be an occasion of sin for our audience."

The Passion of the Christ did more than change Hollywood's support for faith-themed projects; it also showed Christians the power of films "to be the means of doing good in the world," she said.

"The church set the standards for beautiful art, for music, for architecture back in the Middle Ages," Nicolosi said. "The church has to wake up and get back to excellence. I think it will happen."

Thanks to the journalist, Richard Vara, for being so gracious and fair. Special thanks to the heroic Bill Cork of the Archdiocese of Houston for driving me around all that day, and for sitting through the long interview (and the tortuous photo session... Yes, that photo was the result of about forty minutes of painstaking effort by the Chronicle's staff photographer. Rats.).

Please beam me up, Jesus.

This just in courtesy of The Seattle Times:

The Sundance Film Festival announced Wednesday that Seattle filmmaker Robinson Devor's documentary "Zoo" has been accepted into the 2007 festival's documentary competition. The film examines the widely reported case of an Enumclaw man who died in 2005 after having sex with a horse.

I don't suppose anybody has any idea about the appropriate vehicle to protest this? Is there a way someone can say to the overlords at Sundance that bestiality is not pushing the envelope of artistic expression, but is just pushing human society into the crude, coarse hell of anti-civilization?

You feel that hard, pit in your stomach? That's your better instincts telling you that in a couple years, bestiality will be old hat on the screen.

"And the days will come when people will say to the mountains, 'Cover us!'"

Un-Bond

I went to see Casino Royale last night. Profoundly disturbing film. Much of the movie is really the stuff of a top action film. But I think it may have singled-handedly ruined one of my favorite screen characters for me. Rah.

The people who are saying that the film is the best Bond movie ever are mistaken. It isn't really a Bond film, is it? The whole tone of the movie is different. Whereas the Bond films are famously tongue in cheek, this film has absolutely no sense of irony or absurdity. Where Bond films are generally thrilling with the creativity of the gadgets in action, this film is tense with the principle gadget being the brutalized body of the main character himself. Where you usually walk out of a Bond film feeling a rush, this film left me very disturbed...in a violated kind of "I never wanted to see stuff like that kind of way."

Just so we know what we are talking about, I am referring to the fact that I never wanted to see my beloved Bond, James Bond, stripped naked and bound in a cane chair to then have his scrotum viciously beat on while he screams in agony. Nope, never wanted to see that.

(Yeah, maybe that counts as giving away a spoiler. But I'm feeling really mad that somebody took my Bond away this morning. But really, I look at it as more of a warning to those who don't like to get violated than giving away a plot point. I felt completely disgusted that none of the Christian critics had cued me in that a truly perverted, vile scene was coming. What the hell is wrong with us in the Church these day?! We've gotten so avant garde that we are afraid to send out a loud, resounding "BLECK!" when we get slimed by the culture? And watching that scene was getting slimed, my friends. The fact that you didn't register it as such just means your innocence has been lost.)

Now, it may be that the whole problem was with the idea of the James Bond franchise in the first place. Here is a character that is the embodiment of the Sexual Revolution. eh? He's free (no troubling conscience), he's fabulous (terribly clever, cool cars, limitless money, exotic places, never gets caught by a stray bullet) and he's getting tons of sex with only gorgeous women (no AIDS, vd or pregnancy in this universe). And that's all a lie, isn't it?

So, by this reasoning, Casino Royale is one more deconstruction of the web of boomer lies....? Maybe. The film feels much more cynical than enlightening. It seems to me to be one more shredding of a beloved hero, for no good reason except to take something people love and spit in their eye.

See, the thing is, the James Bond franchise was formerly fun because the films were always winking at the lies of the popular culture, and the Sexual Revolution in particular. We all knew that his life was the stuff of fantasy. We weren't looking for realism in Bond andy more than we were in Superman (before we saw his 2006 reincarnation stuck in an adolescent cruch that had him knock up chick and then become a deadbeat dad). Did anybody really need Casino Royale to shatter their faith in Octopussy cliques and albino assassins?

Stay tuned, next week we are going to see a film in which we learn that not only didn't the prince marry Cinderella, but rather, the corporate climate of corruption which is the DARK REALITY beneath the trappings of monarchy, refused the poor little fool health insurance to treat the ACTUALLY REAL TB that she got while ingesting fumes from trying to make herself slippers out of broken shards of her REAL filthy basement HUD-assisted low income housing, because the REAL shoes that she should have gotten from a VERIFIABLE government contractor were IN FACT made of cheap materials in a third world sweat shop and fell apart. All that stuff about a fairy god-mother and glorious pumpkin carriage were the result of crystal meth haze which her step-mother got her addicted to so she could profit off the kid as a sex-slave.

Aren't you glad you know the whole story now? Buck up you idealistic fools! Movies are hard, then you die.

Oh yes, another disturbing note... When I was in film school, my radical feminist lesbian professors were quite adament that we all leave Northwestern with a keen sense of what they called "the male gaze" in cinema. The "Male Gaze" is a fundamentally skewed-with-patriarchy way of seeing the world and especially women that, my professors contended, was predicable of pretty much all of classic Hollywood cinema. They used to endlessly dissect camera angles and lighting in shots to reveal cues of the male desire to dominate and dehumanize women. A lot of times I thought my professors were nuts and paranoid. But every now and then they had a point.

Well, I gotta say, there is something icky in Casino Royale that feels very much like what we could call "the homosexual gaze." The women in the film, first of all, spend much of the film very ioconically made up - shall we say, like Liza Minelli or a Marilyn impersonator? Then, the women all end up as victims of sick and/or violent acts. All three are tortured or threatened with torture. Can we say the disdain of women is part of the homosexual "culture," even unofficially? (Cause I have seen it first hand, and I'm not in a mood to deny my own experience today.) Anyway, I don't recall women being tortured as part of the traditional Bond canon.

Then, there are the many loving and languid shots of the - admittedly picturesque - torso of the star, Mr. Craig. A more notable one of these was Bond coming out of the water - and the camera almost cuts off his head to focus on the middle of his body. I don't remember the same kinds of voyeuristic shots holding on the mid-section of Sean Connery.

Finally, there is the afore-mentioned, extended, gratuitous, sado-masochistic torture scene in which a naked and slimey Bond, James Bond, is first complimented on his fine body by the lascivious male villain, and then, well, whipped on his privates. In between screaming in pain, Bond cries out for more evidencing a sick enjoyment of the sexual torture. It is a kind of moment that deserves to be dissected by film scholars for evidence of the "gay gaze." (Oh yeah, and as I learned in film school, it deosn't matter if the filmmakers are gay here. This stuff is systemic.)

But maybe all that feminist film theory stuff in film school just has me seeing goblins everywhere!

If you like your action tense, brutal and perverse, go see Casino Royale. I certainly wouldn't let my kids go.

You Can Quote Me

John Paul II on The Passion of the Christ: "It is as it was."

Barb N. on The Nativity: "It is what it is."

Strangely More Inept Than Fiction

My sisters and I ran out to see the latest movie with Emma Thompson in it, Stranger Than Fiction, because we have been huges fans of hers since Dead Again.

Well, the picture fails terribly in many areas - casting, direction, production design, and, of course, writing, and so it would be lamentably forgettable, except for one thing. The film repeats over and over a shocking technical blunder that we just don't get to see in Hollywood films these days. Long after we stopped trying to follow the film's mess of a story, my sister and I were waiting expectantly for the sound boom to peek-a-boo into every scene.

I've scanned both IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, and nobody seems to be commenting on what is to me an astounding technical gaff...pun intended. I can't figure out how this could have happened in modern technically obsessed Hollywood. And then, I can't figure out why the critics are covering for this kind of inexcusable screw-up.

It starts early in the film and goes all the way to the end. My sister noticed it before me,

"Hey, what's that black thing bouncing on the ceiling."

"Humph. It's the boom."

"The what?"

"The boom...Maybe it's going to be a plot point. You know, maybe the whole story of his life is actually being made into a fiction movie."

A scene or so later, there it was again. A dark fuzzy ellipse bouncing down between the two actors.

"There it is again."

"Yeah. What a mess. Is it possible that nobody was watching dailies of this project?"

"No. No. It HAS to be on purpose."

"Yah think? Why not? This film is so beyond credibility that the idea that the whole thing might be a film in a film is intriguing."

A few scenes later it was back. Bobbing in and out. And then again a scene later."

"I know what it is. Will Farrell is really tall. Maybe the boom operator is having a hard time adjusting to the fact that he is towering over Dustin Hoffman."

"No, no, no. I'm telling you it is on purpose. They couldn't have that many screw ups in the film."

But then, there was the boom again, hovering over a scene with just Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman. I think the boom must have intruded into the screen about fifty times during the film. How weird is that? Does this mean that the director was not looking into the camera enough? Or that the cinematographer was asleep? Or that the producers didn't have time for the dailies? (Help me out here, Jan.) Whatever it is, Stranger Than Fiction ends up being truly much stranger than any other movie I have seen for a while. The one thing Hollywood can usually boast about is technical craft.

Putting a good spin on it, watching for the boom to peek into the scene was really the only suspense in this terrible film. Pass. A big booming one.

A Prayer of Gratitude for Delle Chatman

My beloved friend, writing mentor and Act One faculty member Delle Chatman died Tuesday after a long battle with cancer. She fought recurrent ovarian cancer
for just over four years, and each year she rebounded and spent precious
time teaching at the opening retreats of our Writing Program. She
joined us as recently as this July to teach at the 2006 Summer Writing
Program retreat in Malibu.

I first met Delle at Northwestern University where she headed up the screenwriting department. I remember thinking on the first day of class with her, "This lady has got to be a Christian." She stood out from the bitter, intolerant nostalgic Marxists on the film department faculty there because of her grace and passion for beauty, and her genuine respect for each student.

Delle was an amazing person and absolutely defied any easy categorization. She was always kind and full of hope and optimism. I loved her and it makes me sad to think that I will have to wait who knows how long to see her again. Please say a prayer for Delle today, and her daughter and friends and family.

Below are excerpts from a recent email she wrote.

FROM DELLE:

The time has come for me to begin my journey to God through the sacred
corridor of hospice.

The cancer has gotten so far ahead of us that the side effects from the
drugs we're using to overtake it have themselves become debilitating.
Rather than allow further treatment to beat me down, I want to invest my
remaining strength and time in Ramona, God, friends, and getting my
house in order so that my loved ones are not left with a monumental
mound of Delle-dom through which they must sort and sift. To complicate
matters more, because Medicaid has paid for two years of my medical
treatment, if things are left just so, they will come back after my
death and take much of what I hope to leave to the Remarkable Ramona.
This isn't news to any of you who have laid a loved one to rest. One of
my mantras is, "I will not leave a mess!" ...

So many have prayed for so long that I would be delivered from this
horrific disease. Thank you. Thank you for every last prayer and
please do not feel that those prayers have been in vain. I certainly do
not. November 5 is my ***fourth*** "cancer-versary" and for a gal with
Stage IV Ovarian, this has been an extraordinarily long haul. Not only
that. These have been wondrous years for me and Ramona and for me and
the Lord. He's still working with me, even now.

My other mantra is "I'm Yours, Lord. All yours!"

I catch glimpses of Him from time to time, eyes full of compassion and
mercy. He is beautiful to behold.

Pray that my faith holds, that my family's faith holds . . . and that as
the dust settles all will be well. ...

It has been a privilege to share this journey with each of you.

Peace,

Delle

P.S. Remember, brothers and sisters, either we believe in eternal life
or we don't.

Flags of the Angst Ridden, Ridiculous (Will They Ever Go Away?) Baby-Boomer's Fathers

Gonna take a two second time out from Jane Austen and Santa Barbara polo writing to deride and dismiss Clint Eastwood's latest directoral over-hyped disappointment, Flags of Our Fathers.

A friend of mine had warned me aout the movie in advance by saying, "I wanted to walk out at least twice it made me so angry." Myself, I didn't get as angry, because I have taken to watching the relentless and pathetic ravings of grayhaired baby-boomers with kind of a sick fascination these last few years. I sit there watching them with a cruel grin, the way one watches lobsters hissing while they go headfirst into a pot of boiling water. "You're going down, boys and girls. Your power is gone. And you are the only ones who don't know it. Pass the melted butter."

Anyway, much more egregiously than in Saving Private Ryan, Flags of our Fathers seems to be trying to make the case that nobody who fights in a war is a hero. They just end up there on battlefields and then their bodies get chopped up by the whims of meglomanical politicians and generals. And they die confused and angry and wondering what the hell we are all here for anyway?

This kind of tedious angst absolutely fits from a generation that decided to rebel against everything in their youth, and now have nothing in which to believe. But the thing that makes it my business, is that it absolutely undercuts any fun I might have at the movies, watching a story where the filmmaker has no coherent point of view!

Movies are supposed to be better than the real. That is, they are supposed to offer some kind of coherent, intelligible meaning. The audience is watching to try to put together and then either assent to or reject whatever the filmmaker is communicating. If the filmmaker is basically communicating, "Heros? Whatever. What does anything matter anyway?" then the viewing experience will be alternately disquieting and then confusing and finally irritating to the audience.

So, nobody in the theater clapped at the end of Flags of Our Fathers ...unless you count the nods we got to my sister's exhalation, "Thank God that's over" as being a kind of accolade.

Maybe I should get more specific here....

The movie makes the classic story mistake of making much ado about nothing and missing something much bigger in the process.

So, the basic storyline is, "Nevermind those 5,000 guys who died fighting the Japanese on Iwo Jima. The BIG story is how there were two photographs taken of these guys raising the flag!!!! God, CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?! They had TWO flag-raisings on Iwo Jima!!!!! IT'S STUNNINGLY MIND-BLOWING!!!!!! TWO FLAG PICTURES!!! QUICK! SOMEBODY CALL CLINT EASTWOOD!!!!!"

I remember once a student of mine coming to me with a pitch for a movie. The idea was basically flawed in the same way as Flags of our Fathers. The pitch was all about the story of the first "First Man" of the United States. That is, the first guy married to the first female president. So, the movie story kept talking about the woes of the first first man trying to pick out china and then decorating the White House and trying to get the kids off to school all while the first lady president is dealing with avoiding WWIII.

See the problem? The big story is THE FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT! The first, "First man" is the stuff of a comic sub-plot on the side.

This was the problem with the original West Wing concept, btw. In exactly one week, Sorkin and company figured out that the West Wing was only interesting because of its proximity to the Oval Office, and that the Presidency needed to be what the show was really about.

Okay, so, the first flaw of Flags is, as my sister said to me halfway through the movie and then many times thereafter throughout, and in the car going home, "I really didn't care about the drunk Indian guy. I wanted to be back on that beach with the Marines." Yup.

I can only surmise that the reason the movie, and the book on which it is based, spend so much time on non-essentials in this story, is because they think that politicians conniving to raise money for war bonds is innately more compelling than watching 5,000 Marines die.

For the Watergate generation, however, unmasking dirty politicians is always what it is about. "See, if we can unmask corruption in the establishment, maybe nobody will see the rot and inconsistency and meaninglessness of our own disastrous sexual revolution racked lives. If we can say that "The Greatest Generation" wasn't really that great, maybe we can drown out the voices of our kids who hate us for our selfishness? If we can say that there are no heros, even on a place like Iwo Jima, then maybe we can rid ourselves of the uneasiness we feel for our own pampered narcissitic lives?"

The look of Flags is great. There are some beautiful tableaus of the starkness and horror of war. Some of the bloody effects were badly executed and border on slasher-cheesy, but the main look of the battle scenes was quite effective. We just get far too little of it.

I went to the movie expecting to see fleshed out some of the myriad heroic stories of which I have read so much in my weird obsession with battlefield heroics. There were none of the Iwo Jima stories here. Just an obsession with a minor factoid that should have been a two minute scene at best in the larger story.

As with every Eastwood film, the directing of the actors here is horrific. The characters are all made to be one dimensional stereotypes - remember the "bad bully guys" in the gym and the redneck Christian trailer dwellers in Million Dollar Baby? Well, here we have "crooked corporate lobbyist guy", "arrogant clueless senator guy", "angry brutish general guys" and lots of "clueless farmboy soldier guys." And many more. They could make a dictionary of stereotypical characters from Clint's filmography. Really, really a bad actor's director.

Flags should be buried with a jubilant jazz-styled riff of TAPS. Don't hit this beach. Pass, Marines.

Jan's New Potter Book!

Friend, colleague and fellow blogger Jan "The Maven" Batchler has just got a book out in time for the Christmas season. It is the ultimate rush gift for anybody who loves Harry Potter. Jan has predicted with astute precision where J.K. Rowling should and even must go in the last book of the series to tie up all the loose ends and threads of her earlier work.

I am not really one of the race of Potter (although I like the movies), but even I have been fascinated to read Jan's recollections, deductions and insights. It's a fun read. Check it out!

_____________________________________

Dear friends--

I'm very happy to announce the publication of WHAT WILL HARRY DO?: THE UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO PAYOFFS AND POSSIBILITIES IN BOOK 7.

This is a great read for any Harry Potter fans -- and a great gift! It will soon be available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.com -- but you can get it at a substantial discount NOW, by clicking "What Will Harry Do? The Unofficial Guide to Payoffs and Possibilities in Book 7 by Janet Scott Batchler" (or paste this URL into your browser: http://www.lulu.com/content/318567).

Here's a brief description, and some of the advance praise for the book:

WHAT WILL HARRY DO? ..... Will Harry return to Hogwarts? Is Draco a werewolf? What did happen at Godric's Hollow? What is the sixth Horcrux? Is Snape truly evil? Truly good? Or just out for himself? Who will live?... Who will die? You may think you have to wait for HP Book 7 to answer these questions. But the clues... the set-ups for them have already been cleverly established in Books 1 through 6, and are just waiting for you to put the pieces together. WHAT WILL HARRY DO? is the unofficial guide that will help you unlock the puzzles of the all-encompassing question: What Happens Next?

ADVANCE EXCITEMENT FOR "WHAT WILL HARRY DO?"

"Not only is WHAT WILL HARRY DO? must reading as far as Book 7 speculation goes, it's a long-lasting representation of the best in Harry Potter thinking..." - Travis Prinzi, SwordOfGryffindor.com

"...I was hooked. Janet's book will definitely tide us over until the publication of Book 7." - LaShawn Barber, FantasyFictionforChristians.com

"...Her command of canon is magisterial and her 'set-up and payoff' approach to speculation is novel and engaging... You will be challenged to reconsider what you thought you knew for sure." - John Granger, author of "Looking for God in Harry Potter" and "Unlocking Harry Potter"

Don't forget to buy your copy today!!! And SPREAD THE WORD -- feel free to forward this e-mail to any interested party or website you like! Thanks!

It's The Most Wonderful Concerts of the Year

Here follows info about the annual Christmas concerts performed by the Daughters of St. Paul choir. Lovely music - perfect pitch, perfect timing, perfect harmony - the nuns do it right. It's worth a trip to the tri-state area just to hear them.

________________________________

DAUGHTERS OF ST. PAUL IN CONCERT!

"SEASON OF LOVE"

JOIN US IN CELEBRATING THE BIRTH OF CHRIST THROUGH SONG.

STATEN ISLAND, NY
Thursday, November 30, 6pm
Benefit Concert/Dinner for the Daughters of St. Paul, Hilton Garden Inn
1110 South Ave @ Lois Lane
Call for ticket reservations: 718-477-2100 ex 244

MANHATTAN, NY
Saturday, December 2, 1pm
St. Malachy's Church (The Actor's Chapel)
239 W 49th St. @ Broadway
free will offering, call for info: 212-754-1110

PRINCETON, NJ
Sunday, December 3, 3pm
St. Paul's Church, 214 Nassau St.
free will offering, call for info: 732-572-1200

PHILADELPHIA, PA
Wednesday, December 6, 7pm
Bala Golf Club, 2200 Belmont Ave.
Call for ticket reservations: 215-676-9494

BOSTON, MA
Saturday, December 9, 7pm
Sunday, December 10, 3pm
Daughters of St. Paul Convent
50 St. Paul's Ave., Jamaica Plain
free will offering, call for info: 617-522-8911

See Barb in Houston, #2

I will be giving another talk open to the public in Houston, next Thursday night, the 16th Thursday at 7:30pm at University of St. Thomas, Cullen Hall, sponsored by UST Campus Ministry Office and Department of Young Adult and Campus Ministry, Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston.

(Contact at UST is Sr. Maura Behrenfeld, FSE, Director of Campus Ministry, 713-525-3589 for more information.)

Special thanks to Bill Cork for making all this "See Barb in Houston" stuff happen!

See Barb in Houston, #1

I will be giving a talk in Houston Thursday, November 16th
at noon at Texas A&M University, Galveston, sponsored by Catholic Student Organization.

We're not sure yet of the exact location. I will post it as soon as I know.