Book Review: Breakfast on Pluto by Patrick McCabe

Rating: B+/ Call me crazy, but I count Patrick McCabe’s 1992 novel The Butcher Boy among my favorite and most influential books of all time. Sure, it’s Bleak with a capital B, but it turned me on to my current fascination with books featuring unreliable narrators. It was made into a 1997 movie by Neil Jordan, and while it was surprisingly good with a convincing performance by Eamonn Owens as the book’s mentally disturbed narrator, Francie, some of the book’s brilliance was lost in translation.

Movie Review: The Exorcist (1973)

Rating: B/ So, I finally watched The Exorcist; which makes me kind of late to the party, doesn’t it? My dad, who is a Catholic (or used to be at one time) assured me it was one of the scariest, if not the scariest, movies ever, and he has been talking up just how scary it is for years. Well, as usual, the experience falls short of the hype. Which is not to say The Exorcist is a bad movie; it is definitely an unnerving film with some undeniably creepy moments, and taut editing that makes your hair stand up on end. But I didn’t find myself becoming terrified by it, and there’s definitely something darkly humorous about a possessed twelve-year-old spitting up green goo on a priest’s glasses, and wildly stringing together obscenities like a pro.

Au revoir les enfants (1987)

A single look can change everything.

Louis Malle’s heartbreaking autobiographical film is set in 1944 at Catholic school in Nazi-occupied France, and chronicles a naive preteen’s wrenching coming-of-age. Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse,) a well-to-do adolescent mama’s boy, thinks he knows everything there is to know about the real world, but things are about to get a whole lot realer, and life a lot more harrowing, during a seemingly uneventful stint in boarding school.

A pixyish, somewhat androgynous child already contending with impending puberty, a harrowing experience in it’s own right, Julien is first seen bawling out his doting mother (Francine Racette) at the train station, where she prepares to send him on the train to school. “I don’t give a damn about dad, and I hate you,” he sniffles, caught in the throes of typical adolescent self-absorption and angst.

But Julien finds unexpected pleasure and enjoyment at the academy, where he roughhouses and plays with the other boys in his age group, sells black market jam to the crippled kitchen hand and school outcast Joseph (François Négret,) and strikes up a tentative friendship with a low-key, musically gifted boy named Jean Bonnet (Raphaël Fejtö.)

The nosy Julien does some prying and discovers that his new friend is actually a Jew, named Jean Kippelstein, and smuggled into the school by the altruistic and rebellious Father Jean (Philippe Morier-Genoud.) A hell of a priest and a hell of a good guy, Father Jean quietly defies the Nazi Occupation and does what he thinks is right regardless of what society expects of him.

You might think that 20th-century upper-class French kids are somehow less rambunctious than the modern American preteen, but this movie will inform you otherwise. The boys in this movie, are rowdy, wild, combative, and often rude and mean. They just don’t have an Xbox to lull them into complacency. Most of them are more or less completely unaware that their country is in discord, preferring to roughhouse, haze the new guy, and read each other the dirtiest book they know (The Arabian Nights, the veritable Fifty Shades of Grey of their time.)

Filmmaker Louis Malle chooses wisely not to make the boy characters too worldly or introspective, instead deciding to stick to a more realistic approach to adolescence. And the movie is not without it’s humor- when Jean and Julien wander off during a treasure hunt and get lost in the woods, they run into a scared wild boar and are charitably wrapped in a blanket in the back of a German military vehicle and returned to school.

When they return home to their peers, however, Julien elevates the story to legendary heights- now there was not one, but one hundred mad boars and the soldiers shot at them as they ran through the woods. Why, they barely escaped with their lives. This provides some comic relief, but it also has a lot of truth to it- stories all seem to get bigger in the minds of young boys.

Au revoir les enfants is tender, true-to-life, and achingly sad. The children behave as children will, ignorant of the impending storm, and the adults talk worriedly among themselves. The matter of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is a series of decisions and choices, and morality doesn’t always triumph over doing the cowardly and ultimately shitty thing.

There is at least one main character who does a terrible thing (not Julien, whose ultimate act is comprised of folly. not malice) This person screws the others over and is presumably rewarded for it. The movie teaches a sad but true lesson- Happily ever After can occur for the most undeserving people. The righteous man is not always the one who gets a good outcome. And doing the right thing should be because it’s the moral thing to do, not because you’ll be rewarded for it.

The child actors do an admirable job in a foreign film that almost everyone with a taste for a rich narrative should find accessible. At the end of the movie, Julien says he’ll remember that last morning in January til the day he dies. You should remember this movie as such;  not because it is traumatic, but because it is moving and beautiful, without a hint of bitterness for a carefree childhood torn asunder by life’s cruel ironies.

Gran Torino (2008)

Actor/director Clint Eastwood stars as Walt Kowalski, a grizzled old bulldog of a man. Truculent and more than a little racially biased, Walt is the recently widowed father of uncaring sons, who would like nothing more than to put him in a rest home and get his house and his things. Old Kowalski laments at the state of his neighborhood, which is getting bought out by racial minorities, and is starting to attract an unsavory gang element.

When shy, bookish Hmong teenager Thao (Bee Vang) is pressured by his thuggish cousin into attempting to steal Walt’s beloved Gran Torino automobile (which is, along with his lab Daisy, the only thing Walt truly loves) as a gang initiation, Walt thinks his relations with his neighbors have hit an all-time low. But an unexpected friendship with the youth may be a reprieve for both of them.

Protecting Thao and his strong-willed, bright sister Sue (Ahney Her) puts Walt at odds with the local gang attempting to indoctrinate Thao and leads to a final, dramatic confrontation. Meanwhile, a well-meaning priest (Christopher Carley) has promised Walt’s deceased wife to get him to come to confession, and habitually visits Walt trying to offer him a Catholic perspective on the events surrounding him.

“Gran Torino” is outwardly a pretty simple movie about a prejudiced man coming to terms with a changing America and learning to value Minorities through the humanity of his neighbors, and all the actors, including the Asian non-professionals, give affecting performances. I noticed that early on there’s a little too much exposition offered by Walt’s family, which is a bit strident but keeps the drama moving at a steady pace, as Eastwood has a lot to cover.

Walt’s family really doesn’t give a crap about him- his bitchy granddaughter (Dreama Walker) tries to convince him to will the car to her when he “like, dies” (she says this right to the old man’s face!) and his grandsons sift through his stuff at his wife’s wake with a marked lack of respect. The kids’ father, Mitch, refuses to hold his children accountable and he and his wife are just as eager to claim Walt’s possessions as their offspring are.

Still, Walt finds a surrogate family, so to speak, with the people he least expected to. Walt is outwardly a pretty typical, ignorant, angry, and surly old man but he does behave in some surprising ways while developing at a believable rate. I’m not completely convinced he had removed the stick from his ass at the end (he still uses a very biased rhetoric, ‘gook,’ ‘slope,’ ‘beaner,’ etc.) but that makes his more believable because if he acted like a Disney character by the conclusion of the movie no one would buy it.

Carley plays one of cinema’s only sympathetic priests and he is appealing, as are Vang and Her. Despite the dark subject matter, there is light and humor allowed into the otherwise bleak story. Clint Eastwood does a good job of bringing Walt to life, and the ending is sad and tender but uplifting and hopeful at the same time.