the Prestige: (2006. dir: Christopher Nolan) In the opening shot, the camera pans silently across a forest floor cluttered with top hats. Bale's soft voiceover asks, "Are you watching closely?" In the final shot, we dolly away from a dead man through a burning basement filled with glass tanks, Michael Caine's voiceover explaining that we don't see the secret because we don't really want to see it. They're two brilliant endpieces, and between them lies a masterful piece of storytelling. The less you know about it going in, the better. I will say, though, that even if he'd never made another film, Nolan would still have my unwavering attention just for this.
Mary, Mother of Jesus: (1999. dir: Kevin Connor) Another uninspired, paint-by-numbers nativity. This one was Catholic-backed, by the Shriver family, I think, and it got some press for being a little scandalous, possibly because Mary has a second son in it. I guess that's why these Lives of Mary are so dull, because it's so easy to offend folks. The good news about this one is that Jesus is Christian Bale; the bad news is he's kind of a mama's boy. It's a bit of a maternal fantasy, in fact. Mary gets a lot credit: the parables, for instance, are stories that she told Jesus at his bedside as a boy, and it's only through his mother's continued prompting that he bothers to turn the water into wine at the wedding. Since we follow Mary we miss out on many of the incidents one looks for... a particular supper, for instance, or that forty days in the desert, or a certain agony in a certain garden. A nice touch is that Jesus looks drawn, haunted, and sickly from the time he embraces his calling through much of his ministry, exactly as you might do if you'd taken on a job that only you can do and upon which the well-being of the entire earth throughout history depends.
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