1. The Road: Director John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winner was unforgivably snubbed for Oscar consideration last year, as was leading man Viggo Mortensen for his heart-wrenching work as a widowed father leading his adolescent son across a dangerous, barren  post-apocalyptic America. Muted, heartbreaking, and yet hopeful, this is a story about a father teaching his son about what it takes to survive at any cost other than losing your humanity. Perfectly acted, beautifully directed and paced in such a way that casts an hypnotic spell, “The Road” is part Christian allegory, part zombie movie, and boasts an unforgettable cameo by Robert Duvall.

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2. From Paris With Love: Pierre Morel, the director of “Taken,” returns to familiar ground with yet another satisfying action-thriller unafraid to portray Islamic terrorists as Islamic terrorists. In his best gonzo, wild-eyed, crazy guy performance yet, John Travolta plays an unpredictable but competent spy with an unapologetic love for America and a fresh partner, James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), an ambitious aide to the U.S. Ambassador in Paris. While nowhere near as well-crafted or morally satisfying and righteous as “Taken,” you’re still in for a fast-paced time, a couple of unexpected plot twists, and plenty of action.

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3. Dear John: Based on Nicholas Sparks’ bestseller, director Lasse Hallstrom plays it surprisingly straight in order to effectively tell a wartime romance that’s every bit as earnest, sincere, and refreshingly irony free as what you might catch on Turner Classic Movies. Just before the 9/11 atrocity, John Tyree (Channing Tatum) is on leave from the Army when he meets Savannah (a very good Amanda Seyfried). They quickly fall in love and pledge to begin a life together as soon as John’s military obligation comes to an end. After the towers fall, John chooses to do his duty and re-enlist, a decision that will have greater consequences than either could have ever imagined. You will be amazed at the respect given to morality our military and our country in this sleeper, the first studio film since the War on Terror began to do so. A real gem and an ending poignant enough to stay with you for a while.

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4. Book of Eli: Denzel Washington badassing his way across a post-apocalyptic desert littered with cannibals and marauders? Sold. But as with all great B-flicks a simple yet universal theme drives the plot even more than the action, and in this case that theme is the importance and power of a Christian faith still alive and real in a world where little else is. Never once does this satisfying actioner ever flinch away from, apologize for, or attempt to co-opt what Eli’s book, the last Bible on Earth, means. In a moment of uncharacteristic artistic maturity and restraint, the filmmakers leave that completely up to you.

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5. Brooklyn’s Finest: Told with the muscle and grit we’ve come to expect from director Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day”), Brooklyn’s Finest are three borough cops, each on the precipice of life-changing decisions. A superb Richard Gere plays the beat cop, too old for his uniform but unwilling to do anything beyond the bare minimum in order to survive until retirement, which is just a few days away. Ethan Hawke is torn between his Catholic faith and doing that one dirty thing that will forever solve all his crushing financial problems. Don Cheadle is the undercover narc, too close to those he’s supposed to bust and getting more confused about his loyalties by the day. As expected, the three storylines all culminate in an explosive climax where redemption and justice are meted out in equal parts.

Agenda? What agenda?

Daniel Krandall over at “The American Culture” took a look at the same piece and smelled a different rat, but a rat nonetheless:

The only explanation I can come up with to explain those who deny Hollywood’s left-wing agenda is that they want to remain on the “Above the Line” cocktail party invite list. Either that they are lying to themselves, and are nothing more than useful idiots to left-wing ideologues.

The Washington Post recently reported on Hollywood’s turn toward films promoting spiritual themes. The litany of spiritual themed movies includes Avatar, The Road, The Invention of Lying, The Lovely Bones, The Blind Side, The Book of Eli, Legion, and The Last Station. While many might pause at the “spirituality” the Dream Factory promotes in some of these films, I was struck by this opening quote from Greg Wright, editor at HollywoodJesus.com:

“The more paranoid elements of our culture tend to think Hollywood has a proactive agenda, that producers have a grand scheme to use movies to shape the thinking of audiences. I don’t subscribe to that school. I believe that Hollywood gives audiences what audiences want to see. If people don’t want to see movies with certain messages, they won’t buy tickets. So if there’s a trend out there, it’s one reflecting what people are already thinking and feeling.” [Emphasis added]

Has Mr. Wright been so long in Hollywood that he is no longer aware of the waters within which he swims? Declaring that Hollywood does not have “a proactive agenda” and does not want “to shape the thinking of audiences” is like declaring MSNBC is an unbiased news source and Chris Matthews does not care if Pres. Obama is a grand success as POTUS.

Read the full article here.

…so says Robert Butler in yesterday’s Washington Post: 

It’s everywhere at the multiplex these days: religion. Or if that word makes you uncomfortable, you can go with the more general “spirituality.”

No. It would be foolish to ask for luxuries during times like these.

Times like these represent a post-apocalyptic world where, for reasons never explained, civilization and most of every living creature has been wiped out; a world where forests and cities and mountains have been replaced by a grey barren landscape littered with dead trees; a world where the earth itself seems to grow impatient with the sound of footsteps, often starting fires and creating earthquakes in order to rid itself of any intrusion; a world where the last remnants of man roam in cannibalistic gangs hunting for food.

At first glance this may not sound like the kind of cinematic experience you’re looking for during the holidays. Not with glib Victorian-era detectives and CGI’d Smurfs to choose from. But director John Hillcoat’s spellbinding, emotionally moving, and frequently terrifying adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning “The Road” is, at least in spirit, richly rewarding and therefore perfect for this time of year. This is the rare film about something that matters.

Man (Viggo Mortensen) and Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) push a shopping cart down an empty road framed by tall, bare trees swaying in a wind that makes an unholy sound. Both are filthy, exhausted, constantly threatened by cannibals, always hungry, and father and son.  They head south towards the coast never knowing what’s around the corner. One day it could be marauders, the next a stash of non-perishable food. Why they’re headed in this direction doesn’t matter. What matters is what father teaches son along the way: “Keep the fire.”

That fire is our own humanity.

Man fully understands that Boy might very well lose his life on the road. But no matter how desperate things get Man will never let his son lose what makes him human. A revolver, a few rounds, and what it takes to press the barrel against the boy’s forehead will ensure that. A species of human might well survive this holocaust, a predatory species all too willing to feast on its own. But for Man that’s not enough. Humanity must survive or nothing means anything, and so at all costs he preserves this in his boy.  

Mortensen delivers an Oscar-worthy performance as a decent, everyday man bearing the unspeakable sadness of losing his wife (Charlize Thereon) and charged with guarding the most precious and fragile part of his son, even if he must make the ultimate sacrifice to do so. As a young boy coming of age in Hell, 12 year-old Smit-McPhee is startlingly good using none of those child actor affectations that have been all the rage these last ten years. In her small but pivotal role, Theron’s excellent as a mother unable to deal with bringing a child into a world with no future other than deprivation. Two other supporting roles are memorably handled but I won’t name names and spoil the pleasant surprise I felt when they arrived.

Thanks to two remarkable lead performances and the measured, steady tone Hillcoat perfectly calibrates and never let’s get away from him, almost immediately you’re emotionally invested in the narrative and the plight of its characters. Most effective are heart-rending flashbacks involving the tragedy of Theron’s character. The sense of loss that hangs over every unremittingly bleak frame lingers long after the credits roll.

The spell Hillcoat casts from the opening scene to the last also lingers. And what a pleasure it is these days to be completely drawn into a film without ever once being awkwardly snapped out of it by some clumsy narrative misstep. The beautifully desolate locations and seamless CGI imagery are as crucial to that success as anything.

Most everything Hollywood produces these days seems to be overloaded with eye-popping imagery in the hopes we’ll forget how barren and empty the characters and story are. Part “Fires on the Plain,” part ”Bicycle Thief,” but all Cormac McCarthy, the despairing wastelands of “The Road” might be barren but the characters and the message they carry is anything but. While not for children, this bleak but affecting story of the hope found in a father’s abiding love and, most importantly, faith in his only son, is not only a beautifully produced reminder of what’s important this time of year, it’s also one of the best films of the year.

Newsweek scribe Ramin Setoodeh writes about the trend in the liberal magazine’s latest edition. Setoodeh bemoans the fact that some of the best films lately take a too sober view of society. On that we can agree.

Then, Setoodeh whips out his trusty Bush bashing cudgel and starts a whacking:

You can blame Hollywood’s doom and gloom on the Oscars, but I’m not going to. Instead, I think it’s George W. Bush’s fault. Most liberal directors felt restless under his presidency, and they pushed the envelope with over-the-top, operatic tragedies.

He then compares the recent Oscar nominees to ones during the end of President Bill Clinton’s tenure in the White House – noting such gut-busters as “Shakespeare in Love” and “The Full Monty” to burnish his case.

Suffice to say Oscar voters have a plethora of comedies to choose from every year, but they simply go toward films which have that Academy vibe.

Biopics and Bush bashing documentaries usually lead the way.

But big screen comedies enjoyed  a renaissance during the Bush years, partly thanks to the Judd Apatow machine. Consider “Wedding Crashers,” “Superbad” and “Borat” as just a sampling of the side-splitting films from the last eight years.

And, in a just world, a smart, sweet and bawdy comedy like “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” would have earned a Best Picture nomination. Too bad Oscar voters look down their collective noses at such material.

Comedies, we’ve learned over the years, need not apply when Oscar season begins.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine a film like “Annie Hall” would be an Oscar favorite today, even though it walked away with the 1977 Best Picture statuette.

Blaming Bush for the glut of oh-so serious movies makes little sense – unless you’re writing for a magazine eager to keep slamming the former President while apologizing for the current Commander-in-Chief.

“The Road” is the dark post-apocalyptic journey of an unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) and his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they travel from desolate, dangerous middle America toward the east coast. They hope to find remnants of civilized life there and to recreate what they lost in the mysterious unnamed cataclysm—probably a nuclear war—that left the world lifeless. Lifeless, that is, except for roving bands of cannibals and a few other pilgrims, like them, who search for some semblance of the past.

 The film is directed by John Hillcoat and adapted by Joe Penhall from Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. While not a classically scary film, I still sat on the edge of my seat for the entire 119 minutes. “Bad guys” rarely appear, but the knowledge that at any point cannibals could find the protagonists is disconcerting, and by the end of the film I was emotionally drained from the tense world in which the man and the boy live.

Much like McCarthy’s other work adapted for the screen, “No Country for Old Men,” a sense of hopelessness pervades this film. Early on, a roving band forces Mortensen to use one of his last two bullets—bullets presumably being saved for a desperate murder-suicide when hope finally runs out. From there, the run-ins with cannibals and a few other travelers never end happily. At best the encounters are bleak. Even at the end of “The Road,” hope for the future is tempered by the chilling terrors of the past, and the knowledge that further horrors await.

Color contributes heavily to this hopelessness. There is hardly any color, only varying shades of gray. The first real color the audience sees is red blood. Aside from the blood, color in the film typically differentiates the warmth of life before the cataclysm and life on the road. Key moments of bliss are highlighted with color. When the man and the boy stumble upon a farm with a stocked cellar of canned goods, the colors of the cans of food are what stick out.

The film’s overriding message deals with paternal love. The man says that he sees God in his son. It is his son that sustains him, gives him hope, gives him a reason to persevere to the coast. His love forces him to be candid with his son, so that when the boy is alone he can still survive. He can still “carry the fire.” The film’s website notes that, “to the boy, that is a process of staying the course.”

Mortensen said that “any parent that cares about their kid has these feelings, these doubts, these fears, these concerns. … What’s going to happen when I’m gone?” The message of love, of the passing of the torch, between a father and son is important and well portrayed, and it is this message that prompts the filmmakers to argue that it ends positively.

But beneath this uplifting message is a much bleaker one, and it is this subtler message that left me feeling hopeless at the end, despite the pseudo-happy ending. The film paints a picture of a God who either doesn’t exist, or doesn’t care. The man does not believe in God, though early scenes show him in church with his wife. While he has reason to be bitter for what happened to his wife (she despairs and leaves him, presumably to die alone), the film fails to contrast him with anyone who has kept the faith despite hardships, which churches and individuals around the world prove is possible. This singular view of God as an unknowable, potentially non-existent being, removes any chance at real hope in this world. And while the man still has a god—his son—viewers do not have the same faith in him.

This bleak worldview keeps intimate scenes from feeling truly natural. The film prompts pity, not sorrow, for the boy as he arms himself with his father’s gun and prepares for the future. Even quality acting can’t overcome this message.

“The Road” brings the central question of human existence to the forefront of our minds, but fails to answer it. When you take away everything, what is left to live for? The man lives for his son, his god. It rings empty. Hope cannot be placed solely in the next generation. It must be placed in something greater. If it is, life’s road is not so lonely, or so long.

Imagine that the entire world as you’ve known it has come to an end right before your eyes. Almost everyone has died, or gone crazy scavenging for food, even becoming cannibals in the name of survival. Your beautiful wife, who was the light of your life, left you to wander off in the night and die rather than endure another terrifying day of huddling from the elements and hiding from the human monsters that most everyone else has become. 

And now all that’s left is you – and the ten-year-old son whose care has become your entire purpose of your existence. You had a good life once – until just a decade before – with a dignified career, nights at the opera, and joy emanating from every pore of your beautiful spouse. But now it’s all a memory, and a fading one at that. You haven’t been called by your own name in so long that you and your son are only known as Man and Boy. 

What then, the universe asks? Do you keep a faith in God, or curse the hopelessness around you? Do you try to maintain the fire of a good soul and pass moral values to your son, or do you let your morals and humanity eventually slip away? If your morals slip away in the middle of nowhere, does anyone notice? 

Those are the questions that lie at the root of director John Hillcoat’s profoundly moving adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Road.” Starring Viggo Mortensen in an alternately feral and saintly performance of shattering emotional depth – his are the most haunted eyes I’ve ever seen sustained in a film performance – it is a film that doesn’t shy from some of the most disturbing questions of human existence, yet also guides viewers gently through to a sense of grace and hope that will move, for even days afterward, those brave enough to take the journey. 

The film takes place against some of the most shockingly bleak landscapes (actually Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Oregon, and Mt. St. Helens in Washington) one could ever imagine in America, with millions of rotting trees that have collapsed and cities that have been laid to utter waste. The film never explains whether the destruction was wrought by man-made actions such as nuclear warfare (which appears to be the case, due to the fact that Mortensen’s voiceover says that “all the clocks stopped at 1:17 a.m.” and in a flashback to that moment, he sees walls of flame reflecting off the glass of his home) or an environmental catastrophe (a theory bolstered by the fact that at least one more major tree-felling earthquake takes place in the course of the film). No blame is placed on mankind in either case for the moment of destruction; it is left a disturbing mystery, nagging at the back of viewers’ minds but in a way that expands the sense of dislocation and uncertainty. 

Following the course taken by many other films about desperate journeys, the Man and Boy are heading in the vaguely defined direction of the ocean. The hope is that there, where the land ends, so does the destruction – that beauty will take over, and the opportunity to float away to a better life in an unravaged corner of the world. Yet this vague sense of hope is also often overwhelmed by the sense of constant fear and isolation they have to contend with along the way, never quite knowing who to trust. 

At one moment, they may be running for their lives from a roving band of cannibals that still look like normal, civilized humans. At another, they’re dodging a nasty rainstorm through a shivering night. Yet moments of grace and joy come as well, as when they discover an underground nuclear shelter packed with edible food and warm beds and are able to have a semblance of their former lives for a few days – and yet even then they know it can never last for long. 

There are brief, powerful cameos throughout the film, highlighted by Robert Duvall as a man whose eyes are blinded by cataracts and soul is shattered by the loss of his own son, and Charlize Theron as the wife who gradually loses all hope amid a series of flashbacks. They are among the better people that Man and Boy encounter, but the lesser-known Michael K. Williams also has a pivotal role as The Thief, a man who robs Man and Boy and then forms the ultimate ethical challenge for Man in whether to extract revenge or forgive him for his desperate act. 

In the end, “The Road” is a modern-day parable about the need to maintain morals even when all sense of morality seems lost. It is about maintaining a fire of righteousness even when surrounded by those who have gone wrong. And it is a film that once seen, will be hard to ever forget.