Can we please talk about the difference between contemplative and just slow? OF GODS AND MEN is the most recent César winner and France’s submission to the Oscars, beating Assayas’ CARLOS, Renais’ WILD GRASS, and most conspicuously Denis’ WHITE MATERIAL. Both WHITE MATERIAL and OF GODS AND MEN are about white people in postcolonial Africa caught between the tidal forces of the established state military and rebel extremists told in an impressionistic montage of moments. But where Denis leaves us wanting more, her film bursting with ambiguities and false dichotomies and resonant geopolitical ideas, Beauvois leaves us wanting much less.

It’s only two hours long, padded with liturgical songs and redundancies galore, but the duration lacks mystery, so the longueurs are more flagellating than revelatory. For instance, there’s a scene in which the monks take a vote on whether to stay or to leave now that the local extremists have threatened them. So we start with a wide shot of the last supper, then push in on the leader, Brother Christian, played with marvelous nuance by Lambert Wilson. Then everyone gets a closeup to explain his position. That’s eight close-ups held for the length of a line or two of impromptu allegorical nonsense. And then we have a vote. Eight more close-ups. I get that life here is slow. Hell, I like slow when there’s a point. This is repetitive, uncharacteristically wasteful, and frankly imposing.

Béla Tarr, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, and other long-take directors infuse their films with mystery, wonder, and thematic heft to mull as we wander the path set out for us. OF GODS AND MEN would be contemplative if there were something to contemplate. Instead we’re just enjoying the festival-chic pans across romantic landscapes and interior tableaux familiar from centuries of European painting. It’s pretty cinematography—award-winning, too!—but it serves more to position the film in a tradition of quality than to enhance the film itself.

Which is a shame considering the interesting ideas tossed out and ignored, like the divergences between the peaceful Muslims and the extremists, the similarities between the state army and the rebels, the concept of nonviolent resistance (though resistance doesn’t have much to do with it), the ethics of self-sacrifice, etc. Beauvois wields topicality like a bludgeon, especially next to the nimble FOUR LIONS and thrilling WHITE MATERIAL, but his more timeless themes, like the realities of faith, deliver powerful moments throughout, a strenuous uphill climb to an ecstatic climax set to SWAN LAKE. If only the journey were as stimulating as the destination.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and recently joined Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

I’m not going to add anything to the scholarship on Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy, but holy moly are these films breathtaking.  I’d seen Rome, Open City previously, but, no, I really hadn’t.  A good print, as characterizes the new Criterion transfers, is indescribably immersive.  Post-war Europe comes alive.  First up is Rome, Open City, shot in Rome (also known as the seat of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime) in 1945, I repeat, 1945! Apparently Rossellini and Federico Fellini (you may have heard of him) and Sergio Amidei started the script about two months after the allies tore through Italy ousting the Germans from Rome. While the war was still raging throughout most of the continent and beyond. Which events would be depicted in spiritual sequels Paisan and Germany, Year Zero.

I cannot overstate how fascinating I find this. But had this film come out of the late ‘60s or something, it would still be one of the great works on World War II, like Melville’s Army of Shadows, not least as a document of the real city of Rome in 1945. It’s not even two hours long, but it’s divided into two segments that break cleanly along the point of no return, a grisly surprise for this viewer who was too caught up in the resistance to expect the event that closes out Act 1. No wonder the first half keeps returning to that spiral staircase, all skewed in Rossellini’s vision, up or down, either way, we eventually lose our bearings.  In a telling visual, a bunch of kids return home after curfew, and as the gaggle make their way inexorably up the spiral, kids peel off at the doorsteps of their worried parents to meet their respective, furious ends.

The story of the resistance naturally lends itself to the film’s web structure, a reflection of the Schroeder Plan that divides the city into sectors, boundaries protruding like spokes from the center. The first twenty minutes are a knotty sprawl, as we sneak from scene to scene meeting about twenty agents of varying significance until finally we get a sense of the ultimate shape. Religious filmmakers can be alienating (see below), but at least in Rome, Open City, our hero is speaking my language: “I am a Catholic priest. I believe that anyone fighting for justice and liberty walks in the ways of the Lord, and the ways of the Lord are infinite.”

The priest sequence in Paisan, on the other hand, nearly takes down the film for me. Okay, not really, but can we just pretend that sequence never happened and move on? At first, it appears Rossellini would validate not only multiculturalism but American multiculturalism. But, no, in the end, our right-thinking priest sees the error of his tolerance for spiritual diversity through the passive aggressions of the Italian monks. Forgive me if I don’t venerate before Rossellini’s persuasive genius.

But it really is easy to forget (and some of that sequence remains insightful) as one of the six episodes of Paisan, a short story cycle/rumination on communication and major influence on Inglourious Basterds/tour through Italy as the allies storm Sicily, liberate Naples and Rome, fight insurgents in Florence, and go behind enemy lines on the Po. And, again, Rossellini must be reading my diary: “You’re all alike. You, the Germans, the Fascists. You people with guns are all the same.” Not that I completely agree, but to the nonviolent, what’s the difference?

Germany, Year Zero supports my theory of (slightly) diminishing returns in the trilogy in direct proportion to blatancy of manipulation (all films manipulate us; subtlety is the sticky factor). Paisan’s smash cut to “Fine” is here replaced by the obvious ploy of making a child the protagonist. I won’t go into the narrative, but boy is this an elegant marriage of intellectual argument and emotional involvement. Similar to the others, it’s a real, ‘live portrait of the streets of my reigning favorite city Berlin in 1948. And where Rome, Open City is defiant and Paisan is ambivalent, Germany, Year Zero is necessarily mournful and rightly set in the Nazi capital. The defining moment of the 20th century was an epic tragedy that we’re still mourning.

Which reminds me of a moment of Rossellini’s generosity, a trait that seems only to grow as his work matures. I can’t remember in which film, but probably in Germany, Year Zero, there’s a scene where two Germans are talking about their life after the war. At the end, one of them laments, “Before the war we were national socialists. Now we’re just Nazis.” Rossellini doesn’t linger or let them off the hook, but he humanizes them in a fleeting moment of connection.  Talk about grace.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said.  His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

I’m going to turn 35 in January, which feels old enough to consider myself a man, inexperienced enough to still feel irresponsible; halfway to still being younger than Warren Beatty, alive enough to reflect on what really matters.  And what really matters?  Friendship.  If, as my amazing friend John O’Donohue often said, our identities are dependent on our memories, and how we interpret them, then who I am is inextricably linked to my memories of things I have done with friends.  Strange to think that we’ve been doing The Film Talk for nearly one tenth of my life.  Of course, if Operation Save The Film Talk is the resounding success we all hope it will be, perhaps it will outlast even me (and hey – if you haven’t signed up to support the show and site yet, please do click the link here and consider us – we have some gorgeous gifts on offer this week).  But for now, one tenth of my life still seems like a lot.

Which – in one of my patented not-all-that-subtle segues – brings me to Mike and Rosemary Riddell, writer & film-maker, former Baptist pastor and current family court judge, wearer of the most amazing hats and stylised gin afficianado (in appropriate does), a man who considers his dog a spiritual director, a woman who combines sass and spirit in measures I had never seen anywhere else before I met her, friends beyond my previous imagining of what friends could be; and people about whom you’ll be hearing a fair amount in the next year, because they are making a film whose script mingles the sensitivity of ‘Paris, Texas‘ with the humour of ‘Whale Rider‘, and hangs on the most unusual narrative hook this side of ‘Cold Souls‘: Arthur, a middle-aged homeless Maori fella with schizophrenia in Ponsonby, near Auckland, and believes that he is called to impregnate an unhappily married woman named Margaret with a view to her giving birth to the second incarnation of Jesus.  Simple enough.  He looks at the moon a lot – he made it, you see.  He thinks about life.  He gives good gifts to broken people.  Meanwhile, a cynical television reporter, doubting preacher, and friendly boarding-house owner dance their own way into a deeper appreciation of meaning.

Rosemary Riddell and Tom Burstyn on set

‘The Insatiable Moon‘ is the second best novel I’ve ever read; the script needs no such qualifier: I’ve been excited about this movie since I read the book 12 years ago.  Which means I’ve known Mike and Rose for over a third of my life.  They’re making the film at the moment, with the mighty actor Rawiri Paratene (Koro the grandfather in ‘Whale Rider’) starring as Arthur, and cinematography by Tom Burstyn, while Rosemary directs and Mike watches his words come alive.  The journey to production has been long and tortuous, with funders in and out, some well-known cast members withdrawing after the budget was cut, and only a few weeks ago a step-back-from-the-brink decision not to cancel the film altogether.

Mike Riddell, Tom Burstyn, Rawiri Paratene on set

Mike’s blogging the production here – there’s a delightful sense of a film being born; entirely appropriate, given the novel’s themes of birth and re-birth.  (You can become a fan on Facebook here too.)  The book’s been out of print for a while, but that will surely correct itself when the film is released.  So I’m sending good wishes from ‘The Film Talk’ – we know how hard it is to make a film; we’re always thrilled when people put their heart and souls into cinema; if ‘The Insatiable Moon’ ends up being half the film it could be, the invention of Arthur in the mid-1990s will have been a gift to the world.

[The video above was made a couple of years ago to promote the fundraising for the film - but it gives a taste of things to come.]

You know, we like to be friendly round here, but if you’ve been in the The Film Talk neighbourhood for any length of time, you’ll also know that we often grieve the lack of imagination in most films.  Robots kill some people/people kill more robots; abs-ridden guy meets cute girl/conflict/unification; bloke changes, you know the deal.  So it’s a pleasant surprise to see ‘Turning Green’, your none-too-typical American boy grows up in a small West of Ireland village/competes with the local gangster by selling porn magazines (illegal in the eyes of the State and shameful in the eyes of the Church)/and makes witty comments about what’s wrong with the land of my birth while Timothy Hutton, an actor I like a great deal, snarls at him from under a pork pie hat.

‘Turning Green’ was made four years ago – a runner up in the first season of ‘Project Greenlight’ – and is only now being released, with the absurdly misleading poster above.  To tell you the truth, it’s one of the strangest films I’ve seen – on the one hand trying to make a decent job of assessing Ireland’s paradox, or at least its paradox thirty years ago, when the film is set: the fecund literary culture and freedom narratives of Beckett, Joyce, and Heaney co-mingling with the obsessive puritanism enshrined by the State; on the other, it offers a series of cliches about ‘Oirishness’ – the angry priest, the aul fella who seems glued to the end of the bar, the visions of Mary turned into a kind of foreplay.  It doesn’t help that the movie seems unsure of its tone – is it a dramatic entertainment in the tradition of ‘The Quiet Man’, a comedy in the style of ‘Waking Ned’, or a gangster thriller that should have been re-titled ‘Mystic O’River’?  You get parts of all three here; with a shade or two of Tarantino, and a little Woody Allen neurotic cynicism in the voiceover.

Writer-directors John G Hoffman and Michael Aimette do enough to make this northern Irish writer laugh – sometimes; but also enough to make me feel condescended to, sometimes.  Ireland has been poor, sure; Ireland has been oppressive for some, absolutely; Ireland has a long string of little villages where everybody knows everybody else, of this there is no doubt.  But the lack of any empathetic characters in ‘Turning Green’ has the effect of suggesting there’s no reason to care; and for me, Ireland needs a vision of what we can be, rather than yet more dwelling on what’s wrong with us.

And yet, I found myself almost beguiled by the depiction of my home; and grateful that I wasn’t watching another ‘Troubles’ film or a ‘Ryan’s Daughter‘-style over-romanticisation – there’s a smart little film trying to escape from ‘Turning Green’, one in which the double standard of moral hypocrisy is the heart of the story.  It’s not a stretch to say that cultures that freak out over nudity while people are being killed in their name need a mirror; ‘Turning Green’ offers a very blunt one in an exchange of dialogue that, for me, was worth the weaknesses of the rest of the movie.  When an old man is having trouble describing the package he’s gone to pick up from the post office, the domineering priest in line behind our anti-hero James (played with appropriate detachment by Donal Gallery) huffs and puffs about how ridiculous it is to be wasting his time.  James responds with a line that one imagines was the writers’ intended motto for the whole film:

‘If these people aren’t bombing women and children or starving the homeless, they’re making small talk at the post office’.

Despite the fact that the film doesn’t hang together, glimpses of this coruscating raised eyebrow can be seen throughout; ‘Turning Green’ seems not be a complete work, but it has signs of moving in the right direction.  And it’s a better film than I’d make right now.  (For what it’s worth, ‘Turning Green’ pales in comparison to another film that carries similar themes – the far superior ‘Garage’, Lenny Abrahamson’s Tarkovskian/Rohmeresque film about an Irish petrol station attendant and the encroachment of the Celtic Tiger.)

Meantime, in other Irish news, ‘Prods and Pom-Poms‘, the lovely short documentary about Sandy Row cheerleaders will get its local TV debut for Northern Ireland viewers tomorrow night – you can see it on UTV at 10.35pm, Friday 6th November; and if you’re outside the reach of northern Irish television transmitters, DVDs are still available from its makers.

I’ve spent a monumentally pleasurable afternoon in the presence of Satan; in the form of the ridiculous and wonderful performance that Walter Huston (above) gives in ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’, a film about American history and the mythopoetics of the Yankee soul that deserves to be compared with ‘Citizen Kane’ (and not just because they were both edited by Robert Wise and released by RKO within a month of each other).  It’s an astonishing movie, of the kind that evokes an utterly romanticised vision of pastoral, political and religious life but manages to appear even more realistic for it.  (Story hook?  Poor farmer sells soul to the Devil in exchange for money and crops.  Doesn’t make him happy.)

There’s a hell of a lot more to it than the soul-selling plot point, and I’m writing something more extensive about the whole film, but for now I thought I’d post about what the movie devil looks like.  (I’m also honored to be currently involved in a project with Walter Wink, a theologian and writer who has done more than anyone I can think of to develop an understanding of the concept of Satan as a projection of human evil that is both psychologically healthy and intellectually rigorous, and avoids not only the neurosis that some religious practices can reinforce but also the societal resignation that results when people don’t think clearly about evil.  The fruits of that project should be published in the next year or so; I’ll post details then.  In the meantime, some of you may be interested in Wink’s incredible book ‘Engaging the Powers’, which describes the way in which story/myth is manifested in real-world violence, and how ending the cycle of oppression depends partly on finding a new way to tell stories, and responding to violence with its opposite, rather than pouring gasoline on a fire; this book will, I believe, be read, and its themes practised, for generations to come.)

Walter might enjoy his namesake, Mr Huston’s performance in ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’, partly because it’s played for dark laughs, and partly because it reveals the structure of all human temptation to selfishness: looking up from a sense of scarcity to find an easily-imitated set of behavior played out by someone who seems to offer jealous reward.  You have it, so I want it.  Given that ‘Daniel Webster’ is a myth, it has a moralistic climax – in which the victim is defended on the grounds of national pride; but the film has the maturity to end not on a note of triumph, but a warning: it could happen to you too.  Movie Satan is usually a source of fear; but while fear can teach you something,  for now, I thought I’d write about some of what I have learned from Satan in the movies.  Lessons 5-8 may be the most valuable psychological idea I’ve ever heard; although watching Film Number 8 may make you feel like you’re in Hell.

1: Beware men with long fingernails who hire private detectives.

2: Use a reputable adoption agency.

3: Always bring a Swedish guy with you.

4: Be careful how you judge little things.

5: You’ll be paying those law school debts forever.

6: The Devil only has the power you give him.

7: He really only has the power you give him.

8: Honest.

Tarkovsky’s  ‘Andrei Rublev’, anointed weekly by Jett as the ‘best film ever made’ seems to me to be one of the few films guaranteed to be watched centuries from now, if the art form that captured my heart (and so often betrays it – which means that movies are, in the end, very much like us.  Humans, I mean, not Jett and I per se) lasts past the point when our brains will have been made half synthetic by the friends of Ray Kurzweil.  (To those who may now be complaining at how long that first sentence was, all I can say is, wait til you see ‘Andrei Rublev’.) I finally got to see the film at the weekend; I wanted to wait to see it in a cinema, cued by my old friend the wonderful film critic and art historian Mike Catto who says that watching movies on television is like going to the British Museum to see a mummy rather than visiting the pyramids.  I’m grateful for DVD letting me see films that otherwise would only be evocative titles in my head, but when opportunity arises to get into a theatre, I take it.

And so, ‘Andrei Rublev’.

It’s a film about resurrection – the central character (who certainly isn’t a protagonist in the traditional sense – he responds to circumstances, but doesn’t exactly drive the story) is acted upon by the tragic and awful events that can occur when political power and religious law get too tightly bound together; he changes his mind about some things; he loses the comfort to paint the icons that the world knows him for; he fails to intervene to save someone beautiful; he tries to save someone beautiful; he seems ultimately resigned to the world being broken, and to the medieval Russian church being utterly corrupt, but he eventually finds faith that there is a way to let his gift use him.  And, five hundred years later, in the film’s coda, it does.

Now, I want you to forget what you just read: because it implies that ‘Andrei Rublev’ is nothing more than an epic adventure story, comparable to those other two-named eponymous behemoths ‘Ben-Hur’ and ‘El Cid’.  Certainly it tells a story – although the fact that the story seems to include every psychological motivation and consequence known to humanity makes that an understatement so flimsy it might as well be gibberish.  I can’t convey how the visual shock of this film affected me – my friend who loves it deeply is right when he says that it’s as if Tarkovsky took a time machine back to the fifteenth century and unobtrusively filmed people suffering and praying and living.

It looks that authentic.

And it feels alive.  It has some of the most striking images I’ve ever seen – the horse rolling over and up at the beginning (which seems to me to be a direct reference to Robert Bresson’s ‘Au Hasard Balthasar’, inverting that film’s ending, and an explicit reference to the third day after the Crucifixion), the running of the monks in the rain, the girl frightened and angered by the paint smeared on the wall, the astonishing sequence of horrific pillage, in which one of the most terrifying things in cinema occurs (no more unpleasant than what happens to the bad guys at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, but the tone is so…real?…that you have to look away, and can’t ignore what this film is saying about the misuse of power), the tension of waiting for the bell to chime, and the very last image: four horses, alive and representing life itself, a quantum leap beyond the film’s earlier equine resurrection.

Like I said, it’s a film about life after death, and resurrection of all kinds – the kind that billions of people imagine for the human race, the kind that’s necessary to get up every morning, the kind that the medium in which Tarkovsky worked needs with a kind of desperation I’m not sure it has known before. Cinema’s a miracle, but has forgotten it.  Does anyone know how to bring Tarkovsky back from the dead?

For more on Tarkovsky have a look at our friend Dmitry Trakovsky’s lovely documentary.  Meantime?  Life.

[Images above from the wonderful DVD Beaver site - check it out here.]

And so we turn to the news on a Monday morning: Things are going just fine in the world of dumbed down culture – I just heard a story on NPR suggesting that the writers of Jay Leno’s new TV show might struggle to deal with the fact that they’re on just before the news.  Not because of ratings, but because it is assumed that the audience won’t be able to cope with the shift in tone.  Which leads me inexorably to evolutionary biology, one of the most interesting British film producers working over the past thirty years, and why I rarely go to the movies for pleasure anymore.  Three thoughts follow.

Fact #1: So there’s this guy called Jeremy Thomas.  If you’re into film, you know him; if you’ve seen ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’, or anything Bernardo Bertolucci made since ‘The Last Emperor’, or Cronenberg’s ‘Naked Lunch’, or Jonathan Glazer’s amazing film about love and regret ‘Sexy Beast’, or Wim Wenders’ fascinating little experiment ‘Don’t Come Knocking’, then you know his work.  You know that he is serious about producing movies that both entertain, and say something about the world.  His latest production, directed by Jon Amiel, is called ‘Creation’, and is apparently not really a biopic of Lucifer God Charles Darwin.  It’s the first non-Canadian film in many a year to open the Toronto Film Festival, the gala screening happening just last week.  It looks like it might be a beautiful movie, that watching it might lead me to learn a few things about Darwin, and, given its producer’s habits of cutting through the tendency of some British film exponents to focus on getting people to visit on National Trust properties rather than telling a story about the human heart and what ails it, ‘Creation’ could turn out to be smart too.  (It also has one of the most gorgeous film-pub websites I’ve seen).

Fact #2: And there’s this thing called the Alamance Crossing multiplex cinema; it’s the closest multi-screen cinema to where I happen to be today.  Across its 18 screens, today’s offerings are as follows:

Sorority Row / Tyler Perry’s I Can do Bad all by Myself / Whiteout / 9 /All About Steve / Extract / Gamer / The Final Destination 3D / Halloween II / Inglourious Basterds / Shorts / District 9 / The Time Traveler’s Wife / GI Joe / Julie & Julia / The Proposal

I’d like to see one of these movies.  And I’ve already seen it.

Fact #3: ‘Creation’ opens in the UK and Ireland next week.  But, despite an Oscar-winning producer, bankable stars in the form of Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany; and a subject matter that’s bound to create enough controversy to give birth to the kind of free publicity last seen when Mel Gibson made a few hundred million dollars out of the Crucifixion (to be fair to Mel, that’s the charge Kierkegaard makes of everyone whose profession includes theological reflection; so Mel and I are in the same boat; sort of), no US distributor has yet picked it up.  Now, it may simply be a bad movie; but, of course, on the evidence of what’s showing at Alamance Crossing, that doesn’t seem to be a major factor in whether or not a film gets distributed.  It’s clear that distributors are afraid that ‘Creation’ simply could not sell in the US.  The fact that this underestimates the potential for a campaign among Richard Dawkins acolytes to get bums on seats probably only confirms the fact that theatrical distribution is as rationalised as car production – we know how long a film’s going to stay at the theatre before it’s released – Harry Potter will stick around almost long enough to meet himself in the next sequel; on the other hand we know that we have to rush to see anything with a smaller release pattern before it disappears – remarkable films hitting arthouse screens for one week only, snatched out of our hands like the way my grandmother used to take a coffee mug away to wash it, sometimes before I’d finished drinking.

It may also be that the story of ‘Creation’s woes is a way to drum up publicity now; fair (or unfair) enough, it’s hard to get attention these days if your movie doesn’t star Batman or Megan Fox.  The disturbing element, if it’s true, is that people know that the fissures in what used to be called the culture wars, and which, recent alarming events indicate are making a comeback, can be exploited to make money.  Or to stop other people making money.  When Glenn Beck gets someone to resign because the anger stirred up about the person’s past affiliations has overwhelmed reason, or when progressives use disparaging language to describe the people who turn up to townhall meetings the effect is the same: a monolithic wedge is driven people who are going to have to learn to live together if the gleanings of their heroes are anything like correct (it’s ironic that both creationism and evolutionary biology can be interpreted to posit the notion that in a decaying world, human beings will stand together, in community, or fall as one).

It may be naive to suggest that it’s possible to disagree agreeably; that biblical literalists who dispute evolution could enjoy ‘Creation’ as a story about a historical figure’s personal tragedies and romances, and explore their own intellectual biases afterward; and that their debate partners could talk about this movie without demeaning the people who might feel threatened by it.  That kind of conversation might actually get us somewhere.  Yeah, it’s probably naive.

We’ve all had times when we knew, or thought we knew what we were doing was doomed to fail.  And we kept going.  Maybe we look back on these occasions as learning experiences, maybe they’re embarrassing, maybe we ended up proving our pessimism wrong and actually won when it seemed that the likelihood of success was on a par with de Niro’s hopes of getting to his island retirement at the end of ‘Heat’.

Saw a fascinating little documentary last night, with one of the most unusual premises: Pastor Richard Grasowsky, the protagonist of ‘Audience of One’ saw his first movie at 40 years old, believes he then received a vision from God telling him to make the greatest film ever made – magnificently described as ‘Star Wars’ meets ‘The Ten Commandments’ – and so he tried to make it. His church appears to be put to the service of the movie, they go to Italy to shoot some of it, they rent an enormous studio, they hire actors who don’t appear to know how to act, they pray and dance, they raise some of the money, they get sued by the city council, they pray some more, they behave without guile, they complete two shots of the movie (which show up in the DVD’s deleted scenes and aren’t too bad at all), and the further adventures of Moses Skywalker remains unfinished.

What’s surprising about this film is the tenderness with which it treats the people on screen – it has become fashionable lately to only make fun of religious believers, but while ‘Audience of One’ has a good share of Christians making us laugh, it never mocks. The production company that Pastor Grasowsky set up is called ‘What You See is What You Get’ – and the documentary’s director Mike Jacobs has taken this to heart: the church members are never portrayed as anything other than sincere, kind, good people; misguided, of course, and perhaps not harmless, but no less so than any other ideologically-driven movement that undervalues reason.  (In which category I include the New Atheists as well as fundamentalist religious believers; because both groups deny the evidence of alternative experience.  Sorry.  To TFT listeners who enjoy debating the merits of my religious adherence: I’m looking forward to discussing this movie with you.)

It’s ultimately a sweet film, and the only one in which you’re likely to hear an artist describe his vision for a particular film set as ‘I want an ancient cappuccino shop/futuristic-ancient Starbucks deal’.

There’s nothing like the passion that charismatic Christians can muster; but there may also be nothing like the apparent religious neurosis (that some might call arrogance) that takes over when people aren’t able to subject their personal feelings to what Film Talk listeners know as the ‘Wesleyan Quadrilateral’ (faith, tradition, reason and experience balanced against and with each other).   ‘Audience of One’ doesn’t look particularly deeply into the phenomenon of religious practices that allow Westerners to express their emotions in a manner reminiscent of fire-centered dances in National Geographic documentaries; but it raises the question: when we live in a world that tells us that the best thing a human being can do is to dream big dreams, what should we do when a friend’s dream seems completely absurd?