Michael Kress: November 2006 Archives

"The Nativity Story," director Catherine Hardwicke's film version of the Gospel stories of Jesus' birth, had its world premiere on Sunday at the Vatican. (It opens in the U.S. this week.) Some 7,000 people, including Hardwicke and several high-ranking cardinals, attended the showing--but not Pope Benedict XVI or Keisha Castle-Hughes, the 16-year-old Australian actress who plays Jesus' mother, Mary.

As it turns out, Keisha, like Mary in the Gospels, is pregnant out of wedlock. But unlike Jesus, who was conceived by divine power while Mary remained a virgin, Keisha's unborn baby has an all-too-human father, her 19-year-old boyfriend, Bradley Hull. So the reports started flying that the spectacle of a high-school-age, obviously non-virgin Mary had proved too much for the pope.

The U.K. Guardian reported that a disapproving Benedict had boycotted the Vatican premiere. The Detroit Free Press reported rumors that Keisha had been dropped from the invitation list by offended Vatican officials. There were even suggestions that scandalized Catholics and evangelical Christians planned to stay home from the movie after the news of Keisha's pregnancy broke in October.

At this point, Bill Donohue, the never-word-mincing president of the Catholic League for Religious, jumped into the fray, accusing the media of cooking up the stories that Benedict had refused to see the movie and Keisha had been shunned. "Despite what some think, Christians do not turn their backs on unwed mothers: They provide services for them," an inflamed Donohue wrote in a press release.

Donohue was undoubtedly right about the pope's reasons for his no-show. The Nov. 26 premier of "The Nativity Story" took place less than 48 hours before Benedict's highly publicized trip to Turkey, which was fraught with uncertainty until the last minute because of security concerns. As for whether Keisha Castle-Hughes was dropped from the Vatican's invitation list on account of her pregnancy (or told it would be a good idea not to appear), we'll probably never know what really happened.

The New York Times, however, reported a statement by Keisha's publicist that she was busy working on another movie--and who doesn't trust the New York Times? Furthermore, both the Catholic and the evangelical media remain positive about the movie, as does the secular press. Consider this Nov. 29 headline in Australia's Herald Sun: "Pregnant Actor 'Great Virgin."

-- Charlotte Allen

The first image you see in Stanley Nelson's new documentary "Jonestown: the Life and Death of the Peoples Temple" is a row of smiling young faces--black and white, teens and 20-somethings--taken under a blue and sunny sky. They look as if they could do anything--even carve out a utopia in the jungles of Guyana. Yet within months, they would all be dead, victims of the largest mass suicide/murder in American history.

On Nov. 18, 1978, 913 people, more than 200 of them children, died in Jonestown, Guyana. They had gone there with the Rev. Jim Jones, a charismatic preacher who wanted to establish a self-sufficient, interracial socialist community. Instead, after the shooting deaths of five visitors, including California Congressman Leo Ryan, they either swallowed a cyanide-laced punch or were injected with the poison. The film is Nelson's attempt to trace the Peoples Temple from its roots in Jones's first pulpit in Indiana to its zenith in San Francisco and, ultimately, its horrifying end in the jungles of Central America.

What is really lovely about this film is that it tries to focus not only on the terrible and sad end of the Peoples Temple, but also shows the sense of joy and accomplishment many members felt in the work they were doing--planting crops, building homes, teaching the young, caring for the elderly. Nelson got some great interviews with survivors, eyewitness, ex-members and their families, and their stories lend great depth to the pictures and footage.

But Nelson does not successfully answer the question of why so many people--more than a 1,000--stayed with Jones as he slipped into abuse. The survivors tell of sexual assault and humiliation, public beatings, financial shenanigans and downright lies (footage of Jones supposedly healing a wheelchair bound woman who was actually a church secretary). The viewer cannot help but want to shout "Why the hell did you stay?" at the screen. One survivor explains that by the time the abuse was at its worst, most members felt they were in too deep to leave. They had given up homes and family to join Jones. Others were afraid of a "hit squad" that would target them if they left.

I don't find these answers satisfying. As a reporter, I have written several times about Jonestown and have interviewed several survivors. The one thing I have come away from those interviews with the sense that these people were not weird, stupid or crazy. They are just like everyone else--a fact that, to me, intensifies the horror of what happened to them. Nelson could have spent a few more minutes showing how many people stayed with Jones because they were completely dedicated to the dream of a perfect, integrated world that he promised them--even as his daily actions undermined that dream's very foundation.

So was it suicide or was it murder? Certainly, the children, too young to make a choice between life and death, were murdered. But whether the adults willingly took the poison or did so because they were forced to--by armed guards ringing the pavilion where they died--is still being debated among survivors. The film doesn't try to answer the question, relying on eyewitness accounts that report people swallowing the poison themselves as well as injecting it into the young and the elderly. It's an appropriate choice because no one can claim to know the answer to the question of murder or suicide unless they were there. Seeing this film is as close--thankfully--as any of us will get to being there.

-- Posted by Kimberly Winston

The relatively minor Jewish holiday of Purim is having its moment in the cinematic sun. First came "One Night With the King," a dramatization of the Book of Esther, which is read in synagogues on Purim and whose story the holiday commemorates. Now comes "Home for Purim," a small independent production about a 1940s Southern Jewish family whose matriarch is dying of cancer and dreams of one last Purim together with her family--including her estranged lesbian daughter. And it's getting some surprise Oscar buzz.

Well, sort of. Actually, the movie is "For Your Consideration," and it's the latest send-up from Christopher Guest, maker of the immediately classic mocu-mentaries "Waiting for Guffman," "Best in Show," and "A Mighty Wind." Here, ditching the mocu-mentary format for a straight-up comedy, Guest and crowd skewer Hollywood and its vapid, ego-driven personalities. The movie focuses on the making of, yes, a small indy picture named "Home for Purim"--and what happens to this modest artsy production and its low-key actors when awards buzz comes its way.

Though the characters and set-up offer plenty of laughs, it's the on-set scenes that prove most hilarious here. We see much of "Home for Purim," and somehow, in Guest's hands, the mere presence of a Southern Jewish family dropping Yiddishisms and Jewish terms--a kvelling here, a nebbish there--was enough to keep me and the other critics at my press screening in stitches; this even though my own father comes from a 1940s Southern Jewish family and my grandparents mixed their thick Southern accents with plenty of Yiddishisms and Jewish terms. "Your coming home today was a dang mitzvah," the father says to his son, a line that, minus the "dang" could easily have come from either of my paternal grandparents.

The main inside joke here is that despite offering spot-on Jewish authenticity, Purim is hardly the type of holiday that would draw dispersed, estranged family members back home or around which a dying mother would center her last hope. This underscores the overwrought, over-the-top nature of the drama and provides for more than a few laughs. The song the family sings at their festive Purim meal--complete with groggers (noisemakers) for blotting out evil Haman's name--is worth the price of admission just for the one scene.

Beyond the Jewish riffs, "For Your Consideration" mercilessly mocks every Hollywood type, from the washed-up actor to the vapid publicist to the slick agent to the earnest screenplay-writer to the creatively clueless studio suits. Unlike Guest's previous efforts--where the likes of dog shows and folk musicians are not exactly everyday comic fodder--this film often relies on well-worn, oft-used stereotypes, they still draw laughs here, no matter how familiar they are.

Though Guest's movies always have their tender side beneath the parody, it's even more pronounced in "For Your Consideration," which even provides something of a moral message. It's easy to see how sudden Oscar buzz would affect a small production featuring a mixture of young wannabe stars and old over-the-top career actors. Once the prize is dangled before them, that sense of mission--of art for art's sake, of throwing oneself at a small project with limited expectations--melts away, as individual ego takes over and each principal actor believes the buzz must be focused on himself or herself. As you'd expect, jealousies arise, corporate interest--and meddling--is upped, and the result is far different, for the film and its players, than what was intended.

But don't read too much into it. Mostly, go see "For Your Consideration" for the sheer joy of laughing out loud at the movies. Watch a clip:

I saw a promo for Monday night's "Studio 60" episode and couldn't help wondering: Is this the week that the show--to coin, or at least adapt, a phrase--jumps the cross?

As you probably know, "jumping the shark" has come to refer to that definining moment when a good TV show has gone bad, reached its peak and started downhill, pulled a stunt so absurd that it smacks of out-of-new-ideas desperation--like the Fonz water skiing in leather jacket and jumping over a shark, the archetypal and defining "jumping the shark" moment. To adapt the phrase, I'd like to propose jumping the cross as that defining moment when a TV show trying to cater to the coveted Christian crowd proves beyond a doubt its lack of authenticity, that its religious commitment is only skin deep, drawn up by secular writers without a real clue what it means to write authentic spiritual characters and storylines.

In the case of "Studio 60," fans were disappointed when Harriet--the Christian character central to the show--voiced unapologetic support for premarital sex. But that was a throw-away line to a reporter and hasn't been picked up again in the show. This coming week, however, Harriet apparently agrees to, or at least considers doing, a lingerie photo shoot. I have a feeling that, if she goes through with it, or even considers it seriously, Harriet, and "Studio 60" as a whole, will lose whatever credibility it has among religious viewers, and that will be a shame. The cross will have been jumped.

I'm still a fan of the show, and of Harriet, so my money is on the promo being over-sexed, and overselling that storyline. It's hard to believe that the show's creators would be that clueless; they've carefully crafted Harriet as a hip, fun, intelligent, and imperfect character who is also a passionate Christian and voice of morality and compassion--and I can't believe they'd throw that away for a cheap lingerie-shoot episode. (It would be great to see her wrestling with temptation, as long as she maintains her essential, core values and isn't too gleeful about the opportunity she's considering.) But it is sweeps time, and I am sure others, including some of my fellow Idol Chatterers, would disagree with me on this one.

"Saturday Night Live" opened with this Nancy Pelosi impersonation--in which Kristen Wiig, playing the Speaker-elect, gives voice to every conservative caricature of (and fear about) Democrats, including the notion that liberals are anti-faith. "And whatever you might have heard," Wiig says in a deadpan voice, looking directly into the camera, "the Democratic party is not anti-religion. Whether you're a Wiccan priestess, a Druid, tantric Buddhist, servant of Moloch Lord of Fire, Presbyterian, or member of the cult of Kali, your faith will be respected, so long as no animals are harmed during your ceremonies...." Watch it here:

Watch a clip from "The Simpsons" Golem story:...

On "Dateline" last night, Madonna spoke about the controversy over her adopting an African baby--and, of course, about that other controversy, over her on-stage crucifixion act. Watch that section of the interview:...