Kaw (2007. dir: Sheldon Wilson) *SPOILER ALERT* Not very scary, not very good, but well-acted and rather beautifully lit Canadian revisitation of the Birds. After feeding on Mennonite mad cow carrion, ravens get clannish, anthropophagous and very, very smart (smarter than the humans, who sit around jawing instead of boarding up the damn windows). McHattie enjoys a rare benign turn as the village sad-sack, a demon-rattled alcoholic who ultimately sacrifices himself to destroy the murderous threat, although I'd be hard-pressed to explain just how setting himself and a single gas pump on fire put an end to an entire sky full of mad birds. Ah, well. It's one of several nods the director gives toward the earlier Hitchcock film, including a stunt at the end which leaves an unpleasant, jokey taste in one's cinematic mouth. Still, it's far more enjoyable than I expected it would be, with Rod Taylor as the small-town doc, the Young Indiana Jones himself as a likable small-town lawman, and one surreal little piece of nightmare involving a woman and a pit full of pig carcasses.
MOVIE: 2-1/2 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 3 stars
Mary and Joseph: a Story of Faith (1979. dir: Eric Till) McHattie steals the show as firebrand zealot Judah, preaching war and the advent of a Messiah who will emerge from the clouds dressed in full battle armour to smite down the foes of Israel, until Mary (who knows better) plants an interesting doubt in his mind. Either they're drawing on apocryphal works I don't know (entirely possible), or someone's making a bunch of stuff up in this chronicle of Mary and Joseph as they meet, fall in love, and embark on the hard road to marriage and ultimately the manger (in this case, a cave with some sheep in it). It's odd: some historical details they go to great lengths to get just so, others seem insanely off-kilter. Would the Jews of the time really have stoned to death a pregnant woman, regardless of her crime? Every monotheism I know veers wildly to the rescue of the unborn innocent, and both early Islamic and early Christian executions of adulteresses and other unacceptable women were carried out post-partum.
Also, there's something annoyingly contemporary about the way these people pray, something "Dear God, please let Levi ask me to the Prom" about it. As far as I know, the sympathetically-nodding God who pats our heads as we leave church was not yet conceived at that time. Yahweh then was still the guy who'd ordered Joshua and his heirs to rub out every man, woman and child in Canaan in a multi-generational pogrom. Somewhere in the Zohar it says, "God is not nice. He is not an uncle. He is an earthquake." You want the earthquake on your side, certainly, but you don't chat casually with it like it's your buddy.
Similarly irritating is this version of the Annunciation, in which the angel Gabriel speaks in the even, mellifluous tones of a DJ on a Muzak station... when we all know perfectly well that the angel Gabriel sounds like Christopher Walken.
MOVIE: 2 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 4 stars
Belizaire the Cajun (1986. dir: Glen Pitre) Fantastic independent film from pre-Soderbergh, very-early-Sundance days when independent films were both low-budget and largely unwatched. Using the amount of money Spielberg probably spends on catering, Pitre recreates life in 19th-century rural Louisiana to a degree that feels like you got there in a tardis. It's the little details which convince: things like the powder (what is it? cornstarch?) they throw on the dance floor before the party starts, a card game using pecans instead of money, a neighborhood gathering announced by a rider carrying a red flag. Filming on location with natural lighting and no tricks or tomfoolery with the camera, the result is an unostentatious and authentic world... but that's just the backdrop. The real focus is on the story, and it's a good one. Armand Assante is better than perfect as trickster and healing man Belizaire Breaux: perfect is too sterile a word to describe this joyful and mischievous performance. McHattie plays (with his usual eclat) James Willoughby, the dastardly and dim-witted fellow who has married into wealth and will go to extreme lengths to keep it. (In one of my favorite scenes, the jailed Belizaire tricks the wary but uncomprehending Willoughby into making him rich.) Against rollicking Michael Doucet songs and a historical moment in which the "Americains" are trying to oust the Catholic and French-speaking Cajuns from their swampland homes, the movie is adventure, romance, and whodunnit all at once. Happily recommended.
MOVIE: 5 stars
MCHATTIE FACTOR: 3 stars
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