The Star is To Die For. The Movie Just Dies.

Aristotle asked that a drama have “unity” of action, time, and place. The new “Wonder Woman” movie has these, more or less; what it lacks is unity of common sense.

Each of its three or four acts plays out to a different set of cosmic rules. Imagine Dorothy stepping out of the tornadoed farmhouse in “The Wizard of Oz” and onto the no-man’s land of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” only to find the battle taken over by a DC Comics superhero.

In Act I we meet the Amazons on Island Something-or-Other, and we meet Wonder Woman, who is every bit as cool and photogenic as a little girl as she is in the to-die-for form of Israeli commando/actress Gal Gadot. It’s notable that everyone who told me about this movie before I saw it today told me how awesome Gal Gadot is, which is undeniable. They neglected to tell me that her movie is ludicrous.

“The Hero,” Sort Of

I wanted to like “The Hero” more than I did. I fully expected to.

My brother had recommended it; he has good taste in movies; and like me, for obvious reasons, he is sensitive to old-guy flicks in which the protagonist (not to say hero) has made mistakes along the way and has serious amends to make.

That’s the case with Sam Elliott as Lee Hayden, a Western movie actor who had only one starring role, that being forty years ago. Now on the far side of seventy, Lee finds out he is dying—very early in the film and therefore that’s a very minor spoiler.

What would you do if you found out you were dying and were divorced and alienated from your adult daughter, whom you never failed to disappoint? What Lee does and the sense he makes of his condition are just about the only moral point of this movie or watching it.

Two Little Films that Gave Me Big Pleasure

My wife and I are trying to make a weekly thing of movie going. You know, the real thing, where you go to a movie? It’s one of the better, cheaper dates.

So last week, sifting through the summer dreck of action and explo, I gave her two choices: “Norman,” starring Richard Gere as a New York “fixer”; and “Megan Leavey,” about a female Marine who serves as a dog handler, sniffing out IEDs in Iraq.

Now we’ve seen them, and although we both enjoyed “Norman” more, I particularly liked “Megan Leavey.” My wife rightly commented that it is manipulative in the way that it systematically pulls on your heart-strings. All I could say by way of rejoinder was that “Megan Leavey” is the first dog movie to make me cry since “Old Yeller.”

Mercy at the Movies

I watched “Manchester by the Sea” again last night and so should you, especially if you’re one of those people who thought it was too depressing, a downer, saaaaad.

I couldn’t disagree more. “Manchester by the Sea” is not only the best picture I’ve seen in the past twelve months (“Moonlight”? Best Picture? Seriously?). It’s also the most Catholic.

I don’t mean that the characters are Catholic, which they are. Lee (“Best Actor” Casey Affleck) reminds his nephew of this fact, adding that, by the way, Catholics are Christians. It’s not only that the plot effectively centers on a Catholic funeral and a Catholic burial.

What makes the film Catholic is its portrayal of mercy. “Manchester by the Sea” was released in the jubilee Year of Mercy declared by Pope Francis.

“Do You Believe?”: Yes

If you sit through “Do You Believe?”—now playing at a multiplex near you but not for long—you may ask yourself, as I did, what was the difference between that well-made independent film and hundreds of other affecting, character-driven stories that pass for what are known these days as indie hits. 

“Do You Believe?” artfully weaves a dozen life stories in a compelling chain of circumstance with enough recognizable faces to make you think you’ve seen another good “little” Hollywood movie.

“Still Alice”: Good Performance, Weak Film

After seeing “Still Alice” this evening, I tried to think of any movie in which I’ve liked Julianne Moore’s character. I couldn’t.

“The Hours” and “Magnolia” are all-time favorites of mine, but in both Moore plays the same wan, limp, neurasthenic person she always seems to portray—certainly not the sort of big-hearted, fun-loving woman I’ve always been attracted to and, in fact, married.

Moore’s IMDB file lists 76 credits for movies and TV, so there’s something about her that appeals, obviously. And she just won the Oscar for her portrayal of Alice Howland, a Columbia professor and mother of three who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimers. Good for her.

I admired Moore’s performance in “Still Alice,” wondering to myself if she had finally found the role that suits her best—a woman whose life is visibly draining from her as we watch. Unfortunately, this Oscar-worthy turn was almost the only thing about the film I did admire.

“Black or White” Has More Dimension than I Expected

I dropped in on Kevin Costner’s new movie on a snowy Sunday afternoon, thinking that “Black and White” would fill the time. It did better than that.

I had been drawn in by the trailer about a grandfather, Elliot Anderson (Costner), learning to care for his mixed-race granddaughter, Eloise (Jillian Estell), alone. Grandma Anderson has just died in a car accident, and Eloise’s mom (Elliot’s daughter) died in childbirth.

This leaves Elliot alone in a posh LA home with a beautiful little girl, a Hispanic housemaid, a full bar, and a serious drinking problem. Of course, he’s grieving after his wife’s sudden death. But Eliot grieves before breakfast and sprays his breath with Binaca before dropping Eloise off at school. You know that’s going to spell trouble.

“Boyhood”: Life Is Just Like This

Some movies offer answers. “The Theory of Everything” taught me something about love and marriage, as “Zero Dark Thirty” said something to me about faith and perseverance.

Other movies ask questions, stopping short of final answers. These movies can be unsettling; but if they ask the right questions, in the right way, they can stay with you longest.

I only saw “Boyhood” two hours ago, but I’m guessing it stays with me a long time.

“Birdman” is Earthbound

I loved “Biutiful,” the last film by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. And I was wowed by the trailer for his new film, “Birdman.”

It features Michael Keaton as a washed-up Hollywood star trying to make a comeback on Broadway while working out his relationship with an adult daughter (I have two). The trailer shows off mystical experiences, a big finish, and the pop licks you hear on trailers but never on the soundtrack. This time it was The Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”

Yes! I thought. A movie for me!

What a disappointment.

“The Imitation Game” Might Have Been More Enigmatic

I imagine that gay icon is the last thing Alan Turing would have wanted to end being, but that is what “The Imitation Game” ends making him.

NOTE: This review contains spoilers if you don’t know much about the life of Alan Turing.

Benedict Cumberbatch, star of TV’s “Sherlock,” is brilliant as the British mathematician, Nazi code–breaker, and grandfather of the thing we now call the computer; and director Morten Tyldum and screenwriter Graham Moore (working from a book by Andrew Hodges) create an affecting triptych of Turing’s life.

In the left panel of the triptych is Turing’s experience as a lonely boy at a British boarding school who sends coded messages to his first love, another boy named Christopher; in the broad center are the war years, when Turing headed up a unit charged with breaking the Nazi code known as Enigma, a feat that may have shortened the war by as many as four years; and on the right is the 1952 booking of Turing for gross indecency, or homosexual acts.

“The Theory of Everything”: A Science Movie about Marriage

In this biopic of cosmologist Stephen Hawking based on his wife Jane’s memoir, Jane explains her husband’s all-encompassing goal: to unify quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Spearing a pea with one fork and a potato with another, she says that the physics for small particles (electrons, atoms) and the physics for large bodies (planets, suns, galaxies) are currently unreconciled. The laws of the pea don’t apply to the potato or vice versa.

My husband, Jane says proudly, is seeking a single equation that will explain both.

“The Theory of Everything” succeeds brilliantly because it reconciles the pea and the potato. It takes on the biggest of all topics, cosmology, while making marriage its focus. It does so with such feeling, such love for its characters, that I found myself weeping through much of the latter half.

“Jesus of Montreal”: Gnostics to the Barricades!

A friend pulled a 25-year-old film off his DVD rack last night and said I needed to watch it. So we did so. My friend knew that I was (a) Catholic and (b) headed to St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal. So “Jesus of Montreal” was a thoughtful title to share with me on New Year’s Eve, and I’m glad my friend did so.

Though I wonder if my friend realized that (c) I had been writing about gnosticism this week? Or that (d) “Jesus of Montreal” shows off gnosticism as a failed project? I doubt it.

Denys Arcand’s 1989 film concerns an experimental theatre troupe mounting an updated passion play on the grounds of the Oratory. The premise of the update is that new archaeological findings have revealed earthshaking information about Jesus of Nazareth. These findings and something or other in the Talmud have “shown” that Jesus’s real name was Yesu ben Panthera, that he was the son of a Roman centurion, and that Mary wasn’t so Virgin.

Or something like that.

A character comments that the Gospel stories were all made up by disciples “a century later, and you know disciples: They lie, they embellish.” The message here, like that of gnosticism, is that the Church doesn’t know what it professes to be talking about, i.e., the real story or meaning of Jesus’s life. What has been handed down by Church tradition is claptrap. We all need to discover the “real” Jesus. (Corollary: We all are capable of discovering the real Jesus.)

Wild? Yes, Sure She Is, but What Else?

Of course, I was riveted by “Wild,” the Reese Witherspoon film about a woman walking the thousand-mile Pacific Crest Trail alone.

I walked the Camino de Santiago with my daughter. I am making a pilgrimage to Montreal alone on foot. Any story of a person taking a long trek under a heavy pack is likely to compel my interest.

But only up to a point. Halfway through this film, I started asking myself two questions:

First, why is Witherspoon the least appealing female character in the movie? She serves not only as star but also as executive producer. She might have given her portrayal a bit more je ne sais quoi. 

Second, why is she walking, where is she going, and what does she hope to find when she gets there? The second question links with a broader question I have been grappling with: What is a pilgrimage and when is a “pilgrimage” only a trek or a hike or an exercise in cultural tourism?

Sellner’s Pilgrimage is Not Mine

I am reading a book on pilgrimage, and I am pissed off. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

I should have known. I should have been smarter.

Standing in the bookstore at the Campion Retreat Center in Weston, Massachusetts, this morning, and looking for a book on pilgrimage, for obvious reasons, I opened Pilgrimage by Edward C. Sellner, for obvious reasons.

As my dear Dad, a southpaw, used to do, I thumbed through the book with my left thumb from back to front, and I immediately came to this page, just before the bibliography:

Five Great Pilgrimage Movies

OK, that was interesting. I looked to see if “The Way” was on the list. It wasn’t but still I gave Sellner a pass. His book must have been published before the making of Emilio Estevez’s film about the Camino de Santiago.

Then I saw his list.

Heartless About the Holocaust?

I took my wife and mother to see the movie version of The Book Thief yesterday afternoon. Katie had read and loved the book—about a German girl in Nazi Germany solaced by reading and writing—so I expected her to love the film.* At my other elbow, my mother left no doubt of her feelings. She reacted with moans and gasps to the visceral horrors: the atrocities of Kristallnacht, the public book-burning, the herding and beating of Jews, the bullying of a good father who refuses to join the Party, the Allied bombing of German civilians.

Between these female pillars of my life, I sat unmoved. The movie’s production values are first-rate, and the acting is superb, especially by Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson as the foster parents of Liesel (Sophie Nélisse), a twelvish girl sent away by her mother to avoid Nazi persecution. But the story did not grab me. I retreated to the lobby to finish my popcorn without annoying my neighbors by crunching it, and to confirm a restaurant reservation. Then I returned to my seat and sat and stared.

“Gravity” without God

As I begin the final chapter of the memoir I have been writing for more than a year, I am re-reading a biography of Joan of Arc that was instrumental in my conversion to the Catholic Church. Halfway through the book yesterday afternoon, I put it down to go watch the new film “Gravity,” starring Sandra Bullock as Dr. Ryan Stone, a woman lost in space.

Joan and Ryan have a lot in common. They are courageous women surviving in a world dominated by men. They face unthinkable odds. They fight their way through one damn thing after another. Along the way each hears voices. (No movie spoilers here, but the best moment in “Gravity”—for all its ridiculously jaw-dropping effects in IMAX 3-D—is the “voice” moment.)

But there are distinct differences between Joan’s story and “Gravity,” and when Katie asked me what I thought of the movie over dinner afterward, I said that I had been thinking about religion, and how the movie doesn’t have it.

Oscar, Shmoscar

I don’t know what conclusions to draw from last night’s Oscars. For one thing, I didn’t watch, so my opinion isn’t worth much. Nor obviously are my predictions.

I was upstairs reading, Katie downstairs watching when the name Christoph Waltz filtered up the well. I said to myself, Bedtime.

There is only one possible explanation for Waltz’s mediocre turn winning best performance by a supporting actor and that explanation is, 21 percent. With five nominees, that’s all the votes it took to win. Waltz outpointing Alan Arkin, Robert DeNiro, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tommy Lee Jones—four top screen actors of our age—is like the Red Sox winning the American League East this year. Winning 21 percent of their games won’t cut it.

It’s Oscar Weekend: Time to Announce the Benedicts

I’ve seen most of the Oscar-nominated films, and we all know which ones are considered Oscarabile. Mostly, they’re “Lincoln,” “Lincoln,” and “Lincoln.” The crop of films is more religious than ever this year, and we’re a day away from honoring one of the least religious of the bunch.

It’s time for the Catholic Oscars. But let’s call them the Benedicts, just because we love the guy from Bavaria, and we’re going to miss him.

Best Picture
The Oscar will go to “Lincoln,” and it is excellent. I called it “a great film about our greatest president.” Ethical it is, but religious, no. Plus, Spielberg’s already got a closetful of statuettes.

The Benedict goes to . . .

“Zero Dark Thirty” and Faith in One God

I woke up yesterday determined to resume my series of posts about the Catechism and turned to the next section, “The Implications of Faith in One God” (222–227). I ended the day at Hollywood Hits, watching “Zero Dark Thirty” with Katie.

Now I am awake in the middle of the night realizing that there was a theme to my day all along: faith works.

All this despite the fact that my much-loved and respected pastor, Father David Barnes, is being reassigned in phase one of the reorganization of the Archdiocese of Boston.

At such times, faith is as vital as oxygen. The Catechism says faith has “enormous consequences for our whole life.” (222) “Zero Dark Thirty” shows it kicking ass.

“Life of Pi” and the Meaning of Memoir

Monday night Katie and I saw “Life of Pi,” a film we’ve had on our list for some time but never got around to. It was an exceptionally moving experience for each of us, but for different reasons. Katie can tell her story if she wishes, but this is my story.

The fact that we have two stories—having seen the same movie and only last night—helps me make one point of this post, which is a point of “Pi” too. This is that how we remember the experiences of our lives is up to us.

If you are a doctrinaire Christian, Hindu, or Muslim, you may be put off by the all-Gods-are-equal spiritualism of the story, in which an Indian boy from Pondicherry is raised honoring the 33 millions gods of Hinduism, then finds Jesus (at age 10 or so), then converts to Islam. Or maybe adds it on like the addition to a house.

But one of the beautiful points of the film is that we have something to learn from every faith and every person—even from our father if, like the one in the movie, he is a science-believing atheist.