Change Your Image
michael-corrieri
Reviews
Without Walls: Hell's Angel: Mother Teresa (1994)
Hatchet Job against somebody helping the poor...
I don't know if I believe in heaven or hell, but if there's a heaven Theresa of Calcutta is as surely there as Hitchens would be if there was a hell, if for nothing else, the sheer lousiness of this film.
And I am not saying it's lousy merely for the content, which is a full frontal assault on a person who spent her entire life working for the poorest of people. It's lousy not only for what it attempts to do - for the clearly stated anti-religious bias of the film maker - but it's lousy in how it does it too, presenting one-sided views of the most anti-Christian interpretation of everything she did, without giving a voice to any others.
SPOILER ALERT: --------------- An example is the "exposure of Theresa's hypocrisy" regarding her own health care. The fact is the poorest of poor in India do not have health care, and the government regulations during the life of Theresa prevented them from receiving pain killers anyway. Those regulations were only loosened in 2012. But this is completely ignored by the film maker, as would be expected in a hatchet job. Mother Theresa, in contrast, had the basic health care insurance that every Catholic nun/priest has, and as a European citizen had access to it, even though she had to leave India to receive it. And that's where the rubber meets the road - as a Catholic it was her religious duty to take the health care, refusing it would have been suicidal, which was itself a sin. -----------------
The film would have been better had it taken into consideration the impact of her beliefs and Catholic doctrine on everything she did, as well as the political situation of the poor in India.
As it was it's just a hit job with gaping holes, and it screams out to even non-Catholic Christians as a really, really, really low-shot. There's plenty of fodder to attack the Roman Catholics without taking pot shots at people who are doing the services nobody else cares to do.
I'll give it 3 stars for continuity and editing. It was better made than most pieces of this type.
Prometheus (2012)
In space, nobody can hear you yawn.
I really wanted to love this movie. I love most of what Ridley's done over the years. And I usually don't write reviews, so forgive me my sophomoric style. But I have something I am compelled to say about this particular movie.
Prometheus has some fantastic elements, some very thoughtful, some funny, and some frightening. It has great CGI, beautiful ships, cool sets, Charlize-freaking-Theron.. all of which are potentially the soup of a great movie. And I can forgive holes in scripts, or ambiguous endings or threads of sub-story endings...
But where this movie fails is in the glue that holds it all together. The main storyline fails at grabbing all these disparate pieces, fitting them into a seamless (or even spotty) whole, and lifting them (and us in the process) up to a new level at the climax of the film. So ultimately, any of the elements of Prometheus, including Charlize-Freaking-Theron (whom I adore, if you didn't notice), become dispensable. They seem detached, and unimportant.
So what exactly is the storyline anyway?
I think it's actually about hubris - Ridley Scott's hubris in thinking he could take all of these multi-million dollar elements, put them in a blender with Charlize-Freaking-Theron and Naomi Rapace, and leave it to the viewers to make Promethean apologetics that would form an actual main storyline in the process. It was hubris believing we would ultimately envisage an underlying genius, given enough time.
I believe the old man in this film is symbolic of Ridley Scott. He has the money and the power to form this voyage, but really has no idea what is waiting at the end. Rather than sharing his wisdom and telling us what he does know, he will squander his chances by having his own creation attempt to interpret it for him of its own volition. Which will of course lead to mayhem and *** SPOILER ALERT*** ...more headless robots.
I think giving it six out of ten stars is generous.