Justice And Blood

In Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” Jamie Foxx portrays a slave named Django (“The D is silent,” he tells another character) who frees his wife from a sadistic plantation owner. (Spoiler alert!)  In the process he kills every white person on the farm, including the owner’s unarmed sister. Among Django’s victims is Tarantino himself, appearing as a minor character so debased and irredeemably stupid that I’m sure even the Pope would say he deserved to die.

I can’t account for everyone’s reaction to the half-hour of airborne intestines at the end of “Django Unchained.” Priest of God and follower of the Prince of Peace, I was rooting for Django all the way. You know the feeling when the bad guys are getting what they deserve. If filmmakers have done their jobs, few in the audience are hoping the suspects will be read their Miranda rights and given the opportunity to reflect on their poor decisions. Something deep in us aches for instant justice. We want to see righteous vengeance in the flash of steel and gunpowder. We want blood.

If you really want to see a bloody mess, ask screenwriter and director Tarantino to justify Django’s mayhem in the context of the Newtown massacre. In one TV interview in early January, he refused to answer. But a few weeks before, on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” he made a useful distinction. The worst moments in “Django Unchained” are depictions of savagery against slaves. They’re not stylized, and Tarantino doesn’t dwell on them. It’s this documentary violence, the vicious reality of slavery, which provokes Django and his friend, played by Christoph Waltz, into an orgy of what Tarantino called “the fun violence.”

Fun violence is the concept I’ve been wrestling with since seeing Tarantino’s entertaining movie (not suitable, in my perhaps too conservative view, for most under 15 or 16). Some think that his movies could inspire real-life attacks by sick people. Others just believe they’re in poor taste. But most critics miss the point, which is that the blood lust is in us already, an integral aspect of our nature. Tarantino is showing us exactly what we’ve come to see, which is also what we came to see when Bruce Willis battled terrorists in "Die Hard" and Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star. Fictional violence against the unquestionably evil gives our animal instincts a chance to bubble deliciously to the surface under carefully controlled conditions.

Owning our instincts, including our taste for violence, is vital to our formation as Christians. Especially as we prepare for Lent and Good Friday, it helps us understand how we might have been persuaded to add our voices to those who shouted “Crucify him!” Jesus’s antagonists concocted a narrative about his blasphemy and pretensions to kingship that triggered the audience’s craving for a spectacle of torture and death. During the long era of public executions in the U.S., people also gave themselves permission to enjoy watching someone die.

It’s up to the experts to say what came first, our hunger for righteous payback or for sheer blood, and how they’re intrinsically bound. But understanding how deeply we want vengeance can help us make better decisions about dilemmas in the world and our lives. Do we ever catch ourselves rushing to judgment, deciding too quickly who’s right and wrong so some sentence can be speedily pronounced? We leave behind the vivid colors and moral clarity of a Tarantino movie and rediscover gray areas and stubborn facts. In a complicated world, give me “Django Discerning” on the judicial bench and in corridors of power, hungry for justice but with a lust for due process.

Movie violence can also deepen our understanding of biblical violence – the massacre of the priests of Baal by God’s prophet Elijah on Mt. Carmel as depicted in 1 Kings or, as described in Exodus, God’s killing of the Egyptian firstborn to free his people from slavery. In their time, these events were portrayed not as fun but as good violence, leading to righteous worship in 1 Kings and freedom in Exodus. God’s role in bloody biblical acts is a question for another time. But God does say this much to his violence-prone people: “Promote justice. Strive to walk in peace. Vengeance is mine, and never yours.”

This post was first published in the parish newsletter of St. John's Church, the Vaya Con Dios.

Fourth Sequel a-Bourning

Disagreeing with some critics' blah reviews, Ramin Setoodeh lists seven reasons to see Tony Gilroy's excellent "The Bourne Legacy." Here's the eighth: It conspicuously sets up a fifth Bourne film in which Matt Damon's Jason Bourne could join Jeremy Renner's new genetically enhanced super-antihero, Aaron Cross, to rescue Joan Allen from scandal and ruin.

Bourne screenwriter Gilroy got to direct "Legacy" after Paul Greenglass, who made no. 2 ("The Bourne Supremacy") and 3 ("Bourne Ultimatum"), bowed out. Damon's willing to be Bourne again if and when Greenglass directs. But other veterans of the Greenglass "Bournes" did appear in Gilory's movie, including Allen, who has a brief but intriguing scene as CIA official Pamela Landy.

At the end of 2007's "Ultimatum," she and Bourne exposed the illegal black ops program that trained Jason to be an assassin. The action of "Legacy" occurs at exactly the same time, as yet another batch of CIA boneheads work desperately to shut down and cover up the even creepier black ops program to which Renner's Aaron Cross belongs. In "Ultimatum," Landy's the triumphant whistle blower. In her scene in "Legacy," we learn that the tables have turned. The sinister forces she exposed are again in control, while she's evidently under indictment for assisting alleged traitor Jason Bourne.

I can't imagine that either the filmmakers or Allen would bother with a 45-second Landy subplot if they weren't hoping to tease Bourne out of retirement, perhaps in concert with Aaron Cross, for another two hours of tightly-wound, high-tech, cold-as-steel truth and justice rectification, the ultimate super-spy buddy movie. With a bow to Bob and Bing, they could call it "Road to Langley." Moby could record the fourth (by my count) version of "Extreme Ways," the best spy movie theme song ever. Here's his third, recorded for "Legacy" with a 110-piece orchestra.

The Source Of All Passion

While Jennifer Westfeldt's script for "Friends With Kids" doesn't give him many lines, little Joe, nearly two years old by the end of the story, returns an explosive performance. There's a de rigueur diarrhea incident, of course. But he's a massive character for another reason. His gravitational pull on parents Jason and Julie (Adam Scott and Westfeldt, who also directed the movie and gives an easy, believable, and deeply moving performance), is irresistible. Jason proudly proclaims his and Julie's aversion to organized religion. In the opening scene, we see a copy of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion next to his bed. But when it comes to marriage, at least insofar as the sacramental notion of families being one flesh is concerned, "Friends With Kids" is as traditional as Gen. 2.

Buddies since college who claim they're not attracted to each other, Jason and Julie become brave domestic reformers. They observe that the sex lives of their married friends deteriorate after they have kids. So they decide they can leapfrog the dictates of natural and family law by having a baby, parenting as friends without putting anything in writing, and then finding partners whom they love and will have spared the rigors of early childhood. No, they don't really think it through.

Before cheerful little Joe drags them back into the prevailing paradigm of familial enslavement, one couple in their circle, Alex and Leslie (beautifully played by Chris O'Dowd and Maya Rudolph), makes it through the fire swamp of child-rearing, while Missy and Ben (Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm) don't. Many of these players are from "Bridesmaids," and I expected Wiig's to be a comic performance instead of a finely-etched tragic one. Hamm is outstanding as well, his despair and frustration seeming to totter on the edge of violence. Their marriage explodes in a merciless scene that occurs over a New Year's Eve dinner (shades of "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?"). Jason and Julie have dragged along their current partners, played by Megan Fox and Edward Burns, who look great on paper and screen but whose long-term prospects are, one always senses and especially so at the New Year's dinner, poor. The writing's already on the nursery wall, where a sign reads "Joe."

After all, Jason and Julie begin with the deeply traditional idea that creating and rearing children are imperatives of human relationship. They live in apartments a few floors away and cheerfully share duties and expenses. A few months after Joe's birth, their married friends arrive for a party, expecting the experiment to have dissolved into chaos. Instead, Julie's apartment is perfect. She and Jason are cheerful and attentive to each other and their guests. She sees to the quiche while he goes to change a diaper. The marrieds are slack-jawed as a perfect afternoon unfolds right out of the pages of "Real Simple." But Julie and Jason aren't succeeding because they're unmarried. Married people can act like that, too. All people can. They're succeeding because they're serving and supporting one another in a good purpose, aka our relentless buddy Joe, which ends up being the source of their and all enduring passion.

Also The Right To Ice Cream

My wife, Kathy, and I were talking and wondering yesterday about how atheists grieve. We'd just seen "The Descendants," which, while a beautiful movie, was relentless about avoiding any reference to spirituality. It's hard to believe that none of Matt King's (George Clooney) 50 friends and relatives would've said, "God bless you" or "we're praying for you" in connection with his stricken wife. When he and and his daughters poured Elizabeth's ashes overboard, he said, "I guess that's it." That's a scary thought, and the one that prompted our conversation.

The characters weren't so much explicit atheists as Stepford secularists to whom the concept of God had never occurred or been mentioned. At the end of the movie they're huddled on a sofa under a blanket, self-medicating with ice cream and a documentary. I'd like to send them the post I just read about Rebecca Hensler, whose infant son died in 2009, and her dedication to helping her fellow nonbelievers get through tragedy. Her Facebook page, according to Huffington Post, is called "Grief Beyond Belief":

A 43-year-old school counselor, Hensler tries to post something every day -- a link, a picture, a question, a thought. Recent topics include a discussion of travel as a balm for pain, a look at how agnostics grieve, and a link to a "Bill of Rights for the Grieving." Right No. 7: "You have the right not to be grateful, reasonable, inspired or inspiring."

Bill And Ted's Midlife Crisis

Even closer to Death this time.

"Boys, This Is My Church"

A Good Friday preview from Karl Malden, testifying in "On The Waterfront"
Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

Adjust This

In "The Adjustment Bureau," the better angels of our nature are a bunch of busybodies who are so overworked that they're not always thinking straight. Starring the winning Matt Damon and Emily Blunt as a meant-for-each-other politician and choreographer, the movie proposes that a Godhead called the Chairman has decided he can't trust us with free will, since look what he gets whenever he tries -- the dark ages, world wars, and "Jersey Shore." So waxing Calvinist, the Chairman sends men in hats to follow us around.

They monitor our step-by-step life plans on their version 3475.0 Kindles and nudge us back on course when we stray, whereupon the story briefly though not fatally swerves into a narrative ditch. The Chairman, who has high hopes for the principled young congressman from Brooklyn, doesn't want Damon's character to marry Blunt's, because true love will stifle his ambition by filling the hole in his heart left by the deaths of his parents and brother. And yet you'd think that if the Chairman wanted a better world, he'd put well-balanced people in power.

There's a hint of an earlier presidential project. According to the story, which opens on the night in November 2006 when Damon's character loses his first senatorial race, the cherubim cum chapeaux had last revealed their existence to someone code-named Taurus 40 years before. The politician beginning his fabled comeback in 1966 was Richard Nixon. While my wife, Kathy, his last chief of staff, asked him about UFOs once, we never saw any middle-aged angels in suits lurking around -- unless they were impersonating Secret Service agents. No hats, but they did wear earplugs and talk into their sleeves. So much for the inevitable Nixon angle, but what about the placeholder for Jesus Christ? Easy, since a ranking deputy angel reveals that the Chairman had decided to trust humanity with free will "at the height of the Roman Empire."

Written (based on a Philip K. Dick short story) and directed by George Nolfi, the movie's delightfully watchable and suspenseful from its first moments. An affable, intelligent script, well-executed cameos by Jon Stewart, Carville-Matalin, and Michael Bloomberg, and Damon's believability as an up-from-the-streets politician lend the story just enough credibility to withstand the sci-fi preposterousness. Damon himself poses the key theodical question when he taunts one of the angels for not doing a better job easing the world's injustice and suffering. "You're still here, aren't you?" the seraph says sullenly.

Damon has better chemistry with his charming co-star, who must've been practicing modern dance at the same time Natalie Portman was strapping on her toe shoes. All their scenes are spot on. I hope someone casts them together again. Only near the end, after Damon had to put on one of those goofy hats and he and Blunt were getting the big reveal, did I have the impression that she was having trouble keeping a straight face.

B Movie, For "Bourne"

In "Unknown," Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) thinks his identity has been stolen. "Unknown" is stolen by a charming pixie of a former agent of the East German Stasi, Ernst Jurgen, played by veteran German actor Bruno Ganz. Jurgen is working as a private investigator in Berlin. The movie meanders a bit until he and Harris meet, whereupon Jurgen livens things up by asking the same plotting questions we've been asking. "It used to be what I was known for," he says with a smile. "The details."

Harris, an American academic, and his icy wife, Elizabeth (January Jones), had arrived four days before for a biotech conference. On his way back to the airport to retrieve his briefcase, his taxi accidentally plunges into a river. By the time he recovers, Elizabeth has hooked up with another Martin Harris back at the conference, and they pretend they've never seen him before.

Once you know the whole story, you'll think again about the off-key interactions between Martin and Elizabeth in the first five carefully constructed minutes. This will tax your memory. The accident taxes (and alters) Harris's. I even forgot, at least for two hours, the unlikeliness of a sympathetic Stasi agent. "We all forget," says Jurgen. "We forgot the Nazis, and now we're forgetting 40 years of communism."

Director Jaume Collet-Serra obviously hasn't forgotten the Bourne movies, on whose conventions "Unknown" relies especially for its fight and chase scenes as well blurry flashbacks of prior capers. Harris's alliance with the taxi driver who saves his life, played by Diane Kruger, operates the same way as Matt Damon's with his costar, Franka Potente, in the first of the epic trilogy.

Overall the movie's too Bourne-again for five stars. It falls apart at the end when a villain insists on trying to disarm a bomb so the explosion won't implicate her and then knocks a conspicuous hole in a hotel suite wall to get at it. It's implied that boring old agribusiness, not ideology, is behind all the bloody mayhem. In a startling scene where Jurgen and an American counterpart (not Nixon, but he played him in the movies) enfold one another in what is simultaneously a death grip and friendly hug, we're reminded again that the Cold War is long gone and yet sometimes, at least by storytellers, lamented.

Best Movie President Speech Scene Ever

From Michael Bay's "Armageddon." And with a reconciliation between a father and son to boot

Just A Little More Morphine For The King, Please

Following the dust-up between Christopher Hitchens and David Seidler, who wrote "The King's Speech," I learned this bit of history, which didn't make the movie. It's Seidler talking to HuffPo's Patricia Zohn:

The only cut I still regret is the exclusion of King George V's euthanasia. The old King was dying, but not on time. Everyone wanted the news to first appear in the respectable Times and on the BBC, not via the disreputable afternoon papers who might mention David's (Edward VIII) scandalous affair with American twice divorcee Wallis Simpson. The deadline (no pun intended) was midnight. The King was inconveniently lingering so they hurried him along with an injection into the jugular vein of a mixture of morphine and cocaine. I felt that including this not only gave more drama to the sequence but also demonstrated the immense power of the new media, which is what Bertie was going to have to face. Although the scene was filmed, Tom and the producers ultimately felt it was such a controversial subject it might overshadow the rest of the film. They're probably right but I still regret the cut.

It seems to me it demonstrated the immense power of the king's doctors. I doubt if anyone forgot about Mrs. Simpson just because the Times got the exclusive. One of the most powerful moments in the somewhat overrated movie was Bertie's outrage at the suggestion by his speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), that his brother's love life might someday put him on the throne. "That's treason!" shouts the dutiful royal, marvelously portrayed by Colin Firth. Meanwhile, there are the palace attendants in the shadows, doing what they do.

Mutton Much

My exercise after seeing "Just Go With It," starring Adam Sandler as a plastic surgeon and Jennifer Aniston as his single-mother assistant, was identifying a redeeming, unblemished feature. Sandler and Aniston had good chemistry in a couple of scenes -- but their winsomeness was nearly crushed by a leaden script. Aniston's kids, played by Bailee Madison and Griffin Gluck, were talented and cute -- but for some reason ten-year-old Bailee spent most of the movie using a tiresome British accent. Nicole Kidman was great as Aniston's college nemesis, with Dave Matthews as her too-good-to-be-true husband, reputedly the inventor of the iPod -- but that deteriorated into mockery of gay men. Rachel Dratch and Kevin Nealon were funny as plastic surgery victims -- but the depth of the film's insights on the subject was purely cosmetic.

You want unmitigated praise? The Hawaiian resort where the hi jinks unfolded looked very nice. And Nick Swardson, pretending to be a sheep salesman for reasons too complicated to explain, had a great moment after a young woman ran into the restaurant where he and Brooklyn Decker, who plays Sandler's girlfriend, were eating and said that her sheep was sick.What do you do with a sick sheep? Body slams and mouth-to-mouth, of course.

More broadly applied, the Farrelly brothers-style lunacy of Swardson's improvised lamb chops might've resuscitated the movie. Sandler was pretending to be married to win Decker; Aniston was pretending to be his husband; Kidman was still pretending to be all that. A mistaken-identity plot and great cast ought to have made for a lot of fun. But "Just Go With It," a title with no discernible connection to the story, ended up being a description of a comic road not taken.

34 Years To Get The Girl

A careful analysis by Simon Gallagher shows that the Bill Murray character in "Groundhog Day" probably relived Groundhog Day 12,403 times.

"Happy," The Rolling Stones

From "Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones." It's Keith's song, but the camera can't keep its eye off Mick Jagger.

Stones 2.0

So you're the greatest rock and roll band in the world, you've been making hit records for nine years, and you're planning a set list for a 48-show U.S. tour to promote your new album. An even mix of old and new, right?

Not if you're the Rolling Stones. In 1972, they didn't play anything more than three years old except Chuck Berry's "Bye Bye Johnny" and, on a few occasions, an encore medley with opening act Stevie Wonder that included "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Besides that, every song was from "Let It Bleed," "Sticky Fingers," and "Exile on Main St.," the epochal new record.

The result of this audaciousness was one of the most legendary tours in rock and roll history (I'm talking about the music, not the activities chronicled in the never-officially-released documentary with the name unfit for a family blog) and the greatest concert movie I've ever seen, "Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones." It was released in a few theaters in 1974, when I saw it twice, being a fanatic. Now, alleluia, it's finally out on DVD, so everyone can see Mick Jagger whipping the stage during "Midnight Rambler" the same year Richard Nixon was whipping George McGovern.

These were the dangerous guys Elvis warned Nixon about during their famous Oval Office meeting, no question. They were also my coming-of-age Stones. My friend Andy relates more to the 1960s iteration. It's more or less all about the the second-chair guitarist to Keith Richards' concertmaster: Band co-founder Brian Jones in the early and mid-1960s, Mick Taylor (shown here) from 1969-74, and Ron Wood ever since.

Wood's always played a lot like Richards. In a song called "Had Me A Real Good Time," which came out in 1971 when he was playing with Rod Stewart and the Faces, he even quotes Richards' riff from "Honky Tonk Women." It's a separated-at-birth kind of thing. In the latter-day Stones movie "Shine A Light," they grin at each other through their cigarette smoke like goofy teenagers. Their collaboration makes the band sound looser and more homogeneous.

The mid-career, Mick Taylor Stones, the ones on the new DVD from the 1972 tour, were astonishingly tight. Taylor, then 23, added a touch of uptown gloss, playing smooth, lyrical solos against Richards' rhythm pistons. The live album "Get Yer Ya-Yas Out" from the 1969 U.S. tour, the year Taylor joined the band, has the same sophisticated, propulsive energy.

But while blues professor Taylor stared down at the fretboard of his Les Paul, Jagger and Richards never looked at him. I'm not sure what that means. It's thought that when he quit two years later, it was because he didn't get along with Richards, who recently said that he's sorry Taylor left. Maybe Keith had just watched this movie again. Every number's sizzling hot, from "Brown Sugar" to "Street Fighting Man." But the Stones have always had a quiet side, too. Jagger-Richards were alt.-country pioneers with "Dead Flowers" and "Sweet Virginia," and in these performances their harmonies are dead-on.

Jagger (wearing three different spangled jumpsuits, since the movie was filmed during three Texas shows) really catches fire about halfway through on "All Down The Line" as the Stones go full bore with their two-piece horn section, Taylor's slide guitar, Richards' Kenworth-gear chord changes, and the Watts-Wyman battery. Not surprisingly, Jagger seemed to take his work a little more seriously back then, his apogee as a composer and performer. The Stones are always good, but in 1972, they were immense.

Drugs Don't Cure People. People Cure People.

Most of the way through "Love And Other Drugs," Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway) and Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal) reenact a classic scene for which Charles Dickens provides perhaps the most timeless rendition in A Christmas Carol. Having been seduced by the mean old world, young Ebenezer Scrooge is released from their engagement by his impoverished fiancee. Every time, you want him to fight for her, but he never does.

The lucre tempting Jamie isn't money (he never comes off as greedy) but the freedom of perpetual adolescence. Maggie, who has stage one Parkinson's Disease, knows that Jamie's ambivalent about being with someone with a wasting illness. We see a lot of these attractive young people. The movie definitely earns its R rating. But Maggie's body is already failing her, and Jamie's far too fixated on a miracle cure. So she makes him leave.

Set in the late 1990s, just before Pfizer rolls out Viagra, the movie's good enough that you understand why he does as she asks. What's a little odd is the confined narrative laboratory in which he finally grows up. If we were told where he and Maggie live, I missed it. The underachieving, unappreciated son of an overachieving doctor, he gets a job as a traveling drug salesman but hardly seems to travel. The wonderful Oliver Platt brackets the movie as a Tums-popping colleague who tantalizes Jamie with a shot at the promised land of Pfizer's Chicago corporate offices if he can get enough doctors to switch from Prozac to Zoloft. Jamie appears to confine his efforts to the same medical plaza and is constantly interacting (in the office, parking lot, and local saloons) with the same clients and competitors.

All we learn about Maggie's background is that she was taking Ritalin at age ten. Floating around her funky, "Singles"-era apartment, she makes collages of her photographs, smokes medical marijuana, and listens to Liz Phair. She appears to support herself by taking cash-strapped senior citizens to Canada to buy drugs. There's plenty of preaching about things medical in the movie, but it's inconsistent. Targets are drug companies, corrupt doctors, and predatory malpractice firms and insurance companies that victimize doctors. Although for sheer comic relief we get TMI about an over-four-hours episode, the little blue pill turns out to be the only thing anyone can really count on, besides, eventually, Jason's emotional potency.

Two Each Out Of Three

Three moderately entertaining movies show you can hide iffy plots behind good pairings: In "RED," the bad guys think Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) knows something prejudicial about the vice president. The arrival of a wet team that surgically demolishes his house follows charming scenes in which Moses, a retired CIA assassin, pretends his pension check hasn't arrived so he can flirt over the phone with government clerk Sarah Moses (Mary-Louise Parker). Moses getting the same clerk every time is the first of a million unlikely things in the movie, but Parker and Willis make a great couple...In 1987's "Broadcast News," Holly Hunter's scrupulous network producer won't run off with William Hurt's anchorman because he doesn't come up to her journalistic standards and she's afraid he represents the wave of the future. In "Morning Glory," producer Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams) saves her network morning show by putting the weatherman on a roller coaster so he'll say the f-word on the air and spends most of the movie trying to convince award-winning journalist Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford) to abase himself for ratings. So Holly was right. TV news has definitely become a sad joke. But thanks to McAdams and Ford, the movie's a joyful romp...Who doesn't love cross-country buddy movies "Midnight Run" and "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles"? "Due Date," manacling Robert Downey Jr. (anger-prone architect) and Zach Galifianakis (goofy, gross actor) together from Atlanta to LA, owes a lot to both movies and improves on neither. The best moment is when they've inadvertently been served coffee made from several ounces of Zach's father's ashes and Downey comforts him as he tries to get the rest of dad back in the can (male bonding fuzzy). I didn't think "The Hangover," also directed by Todd Phillips, was that good, either, at least the first time through. Must be a generational thing.

Big Cat

This guy caught my attention at the movies the other night, though I missed what he's promoting.

"Hereafter" Gave Me The Dickens

In Clint Eastwood's masterpiece "Hereafter," Matt Damon plays a reluctant psychic named George Lonegan who has just one dishonest moment which may actually amount to the same kind of leap of faith theologians have been taking for centuries. A little boy named Marcus (played by both Frankie and George McLaren) has pestered Lonegan into giving him a reading about his late brother, Jason (ditto). When earnest but fairly routine brother-to-brother advice from the great beyond doesn't satisfy Marcus ("You're on your own now, he says"), a calculated look crosses the psychic's face. "He's come back," he suddenly says. The next round of ghostly advice is far more reassuring. "If you're worried about being on your own, don't be. You're not," Lonegan tells Marcus (the bit from the trailer). "You're in him, and he's in you. You're one."

It was pretty clear, at least to me, that Lonegan made the second speech up to make the kid feel better. Or maybe it was inspired revelation. Either way, he was creating doctrine -- sort of like the gospel plus St. Paul plus church tradition. Eastwood and his scriptwriter, Peter Morgan (with whom I briefly discussed matters of faith when he visited the Nixon library several years ago), portray just two supernatural things as true: Lonegan's authentic insights about people in the afterlife and the near-death experience of French TV journalist Marie LeLay (Cecile de France). Such nonsectarian universalism, though insufficient for and even offensive to doctrinaire Christians, was far too churchy for LeLay's producer boyfriend and others in her rigidly secular milieu in Paris, especially after she insists on talking and writing about the visions (welcoming white light and so on) that she experienced when she nearly drowned during the 2004 Indonesian tsunami.

When she and the boyfriend are reunited after the disaster and embrace, you can't imagine them ever letting go. But he does soon enough, after LeLay keeps asking what he thinks heaven's like and he decides to sleep with her on-air replacement. The world's brokenness all too often rips asunder those who love one another, like little Marcus and his drug-addicted mother, and even kills love aborning, as with Lonegan and Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard), who meet in a cooking class in San Francisco. These scenes are the most charming in the movie. In an inspired bit of casting, the teacher is portrayed by Steve Shirripa of "The Sopranos," who plays Nessun dorma and Che gilda manina in class while George and Melanie cautiously flirt and feed one another spoonfuls of Italian delicacies.

But when Melanie learns George is a psychic and insists on a reading, he learns things she can't bear for a near-stranger to know, and their relationship ends. It's happened to him before, and it's the main reason he wants out of the business. Finally, he flees to London, where he meets Marcus (and his brother). Journalist LeLay's there, too, enabling the threads of the story to come together in a way that seems as easy and natural as every moment, line, and note (Eastwood wrote the score, with a little help from Rachmaninoff) in this enchanting, beautifully made movie. He surely has now earned the status of one of our greatest directors.

The freaky thing for me today was the reason George goes to London. He's a Dickens fan who falls asleep listening to passages from David Copperfield, and the first thing he does when he hits town is visit Dickens' house at 48 Doughty St. Kathy and I have been there. But not knowing we'd be seeing a movie tonight about God and Dickens, this afternoon I wrote a post about Dickens and God.

50 Thumbs-Up

Hat tip, thanks to StumbleUpon. Double-click to enlarge.

Real Zzzzzzzz

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg might not have really resented the cool kids at Harvard, but I'll bet the director and writer of "The Social Network," David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, have some snob issues. Real Z denies being obsessed with getting into one of Harvard's social clubs. But members of the Porcellian, especially twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer), come off as pious fops right out of P. G. Wodehouse. A key scene occurs after the duo narrowly loses to a Dutch team at the Henley Rowing Regatta. At a reception afterward, the athletes are wearing sport coats with white piping and look like they're about to sing "He Is An Englishman." I'd guess the filmmakers chose the location mainly so they could flash "Henley-on-Thames" on the screen.

The brothers claim Zuckerberg got the Facebook idea from them (they got a massive settlement in real life) but hesitate to sue at first because it's not what Harvard men do. The real Winklevosses rowed for the U.S. in 2008 in Beijing. Did they deserve their portrayal? Does real Zuckerberg deserve being portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg as an angry, misogynist oddball? Was Napster co-founder and Facebook consultant Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) really the devilish manipulator (in a San Francisco nightclub, his face is actually lit like a grinning jack-o'-lantern) who persuaded Zuckerberg to betray his best friend and founding CFO?

Sorkin, creator of "The West Wing" and writer of "Charlie Wilson's War," doesn't care. A good story, not accuracy, is the thing, he says. His dialog, including Eisenberg's byte-o-babble, is as dazzling as ever. Close your eyes when Zuckerberg's hectoring his girlfriend, and you can almost hear Mary Louse Parker telling Bradley Whitford, "Dating you is like dating a Stairmaster." The ending is poignant, but again, you don't know what it has to do with Zuckerberg and Facebook. What if your problem is that real Z, who after all is only 26, is nowhere near as interesting as 500 million members and $24 billion? Call Aaron Sorkin.