Reviews

Unless I am misunderstanding it, this movie appears to have serious flaws in its plot. The idea that someone could keep an active young girl alive and well by passing food into her mouth through kissing her twice a day beggars belief, unless of course the mother managed to inject a three-course meal on each occasion. Unlikely? Then there is the idea of this same girl dying, only to "return" a few minutes later as a new person, with no memory of her previous experiences. More unlikely?

However, the most serious flaw in my view is that the nurse seemed to take the worst possible course in dealing with the situation after realising that the child was being kept alive by the mother. If, instead of revealing "the truth", she had told a white lie and claimed not to have seen anything untoward (as the wise old nun did), while allowing the mother access to the girl again:

• the girl would have regained her health and happiness
• the family would have stayed together
• the community would have been happy in the knowledge that a miracle was occuring
• the church would have continued receiving payments from tourists
• the inn-keeper would have continued getting extra income from those tourists
• the house would not have been burned down
• the brother would have gone to heaven
• the nurse would have married her new-found lover, stayed in Britain, and had a cart-ful of children to compensate for the tragic loss of her own child, instead of becoming a (soon to be hunted) fugitive in a strange land

These flaws are compensated for by excellent acting and photography, but only just, in my view.

I'm actually surprised that the censors would permit the (dangerous?) idea that God could condone murder. This is also the antithesis of Christianity, which teaches (through the life of Jesus) compassion, tolerance, forgiveness and modesty. Jesus would have forgiven Joe.

Aside from its long and boring monologues, there isn't even a trace of humor, which is the hallmark of a story which takes itself way too seriously.

How could it be possible for the authorities to send a Moslem sheriff to a devoutly Catholic island? Or for an island to be infested with cats when there's nothing for them to eat? Unlikely, unlikely.

And the Angel is a lot less scary than my mother-in-law.

At first I found this film confusing due to the multiracialism, but later came to enjoy it. The acting was uniformly excellent.

However, I don't think that meddling with any country's history is a good idea. What if a fictional account of slavery in a Mississippi plantation had black and white slaves? As well as being offensive to some, young people watching such films would become hopelessly confused. Also, it seems pointless. Nothing is added other than confusion. In the case of this film it is rescued due to excellent acting, but I suspect that continuing the experiment would not be a good idea.

Take the case of Dora, who is more than a little dippy and is a white woman in this film, as opposed to the eminently sensible Agnes who is a black woman. Though I don't imagine for a moment anything was meant by it, there could be cases in subsequent films where viewers might imagine that there was.

A bold experiment, but stick to the history, I say. The English have been pretty tolerant of immigration into the UK from former colonies, but immigration into English history is likely to cause offence at some stage.

Much as we may dislike it, race (being a record of human migration) and history are inextricably entwined. Respect, respect.

The most striking thing for me about this movie is that it deals with a trial about the killing of unarmed people (murder by some standards?) without ever really discussing the moral justification for the killing. It seems that it might be right in one scenario but not in another. Depending on whether (or not) you got the nod and the wink from your commanding officer. And not on whether you actually judged it to be morally right or not yourself. A dangerously flexible morality, perhaps? Or, is it just the way we fight wars these days? Or. Perhaps it's the way we've always fought them but have only just discovered about the nod and the wink.

I did just two months of active service in the Rhodesian bush in the early seventies. Each camp had a period of re-training and during that time we got the nod and the wink from our commanding officer. Beat them about a bit, make them understand that we're tougher than the other side. This in reference to unarmed black civilians. If an unfortunate accident should occur. A slip of the trigger finger. Well. Don't worry, no-one's going to do anything about it. It's all for a good cause. The war cause. Almost anything's OK for the war cause. That war, incidentally, was lost. So was Vietnam.

They say that the first casualty of war is the truth. However that is a manifest lie in itself. The first and last casualties of war are civilians, and in that category I would lump prisoners of war. If they aren't being deliberately bombed, as in Dresden, London or Nagasaki, they are accused of every kind of deception and put up against walls and shot, or displaced in their thousands or millions towards destinations who don't want them, or herded into unsanitary camps to face malnutrition and disease.

Yes, of course the acting and photography are good. However there seemed to be some playing for audience sympathy for the three soldiers on trial, while the Boers were depicted as a ragtag bunch of scarecrows instead of the highly resourceful and religiously devout people that they actually were. After all they were pioneers in a savage land.

The only injustice, in my view, was the injustice to the unarmed men (Boers and priest) who were callously shot. The rest is procedural - there should have been more men on trial, especially amongst the nodders and winkers. More rule 303.

As of now there are almost as many reviews on this site for this movie as for "The Godfather". Yet, you may have noticed that they are sharply divided (in the main) between those who love it and those who hate it. It would make an interesting PhD study to investigate the reasons why this is.

Me, I'm going to go for average. For sure, the movie is not as profound as it seems to suggest. There is, of course, a great deal of beauty in the world about us. Yet there is also a great deal of ugliness. It's important to know the difference between the two, I believe. One should love but one should also feel anger.

All the characters depicted in it have their flaws, apart, perhaps, from the gay couple, whom we never get to know much about. The central character, whose "flashback" we are watching, is Lester Burnham, played brilliantly by Kevin Spacey.

Lester is by no means perfect. For one thing, he is immature, perhaps even irresponsible. If he is angry, it's seldom directed into something worthwhile. He enjoys winding his wife up when he isn't sipping a beer, or smoking dope, or fantasizing about his daughter's best friend. Yet there is a sort of guileless honesty about him, a likeable charm, a flash of childish insurrection, which appealed to me and perhaps does to others. In short, he seems somewhat human, at least by comparison to the others. He is the worm that turned, though in truth he is still mostly a worm.

Lester is concerned that people are treating him as though he didn't exist. This touches on one of the major themes of the movie - connectivity. In the rush to live our modern lives we are losing touch with each other and to the natural world. Lester wants to go back to the time when his family were all connected, and he spends a lot of time gazing at a photograph which depicts it.

His wife Carolyn, playing equally brilliantly by Annette Bening, is a sexually frustrated go-getter (in a business sense). There is little doubt that she is "the boss", a fact which Lester resents (and, like many schoolkids awed by teacher, does whatever he can to irritate her). There is also little doubt that she has completely lost contact with her own family. She charges on, like Liberty leading the people, towards destinations and battlefields unknown. On the way she manages to get hold of a gun, which makes a lot of noise (well, it scared my cat) and looks dangerous.

Sullen, sulky Jane - the daughter (played by Thora Birch) - apparently hates her parents (and possibly most other people). Though a Freudian slip she makes suggests that she actually is fond of Lester but resents the fact that he pays so little attention to her (as opposed to the time he spends salivating over her best friend). At any rate, she too feels isolated.

The only other person I'll mention is Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), the new next-door neighbour with a fancy camera and a shrewd business sense for dealing in dope. You could call him "Mr Connectivity" since he seems to have the knack for finding beauty in almost everything, even Jane (and a plastic bag which dances provocatively in the wind). He has a strong influence on both Lester and Jane.

There you have it. People caught up in the whirlwind of life and in dire need of re-connecting. Not a hugely original theme (compare with Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"), but an important one nevertheless, and handled with considerable humour. Oh, and girls wallowing naked in rose petals. Seven out of ten.

While watching this movie I felt, as some other commentators have suggested, that much of the dialogue was banal in the extreme. If it had been aiming for the box office it wasn't likely to haul in much of an audience, and it didn't.

The banality (?) of the dialogue is intentional. If you are an Oxford don with a ripe young crop of attractive students to reap (or rape?), or an Austrian princess who, despite being very young, has nevertheless had many affairs, at some point something akin to boredom is likely to ensue. The marriages of the dons are failing, they seem to have lost interest in their children. Stephen (Bogarde) doesn't even answer the phone after attempting to rape Anna (Sassard), despite the fact that his wife is in hospital and about to give birth. They descend into a kind of monotonous depravity while attempting to "keep up appearances" in public. The dialogue only reflects the bankruptcy of their inner selves. The darkness of Stephen's house matches the darkness of his soul. The drink flows and flows but it doesn't cheer anyone up.

However, the public image they cultivate for themselves is shattered dramatically when Anna loses control of the car she is driving and kills her fiance, William (York), who is the only one of the central characters who has any kind of freshness or innocence.

All of a sudden they are forced to confront the truth about themselves and their empty lives. Moreover, each of them - Stephen, Charley (Baker) and Anna - is able to see themselves in the others. They depart from each other in mutual self-loathing.

The film, as has been claimed, isn't pointless or meaningless. It is about pointlessness and meaninglessness. Difficult to act no doubt, but a bold and interesting approach which is well worth viewing.

It took me a long time to get around to watching this movie. Fashion photography is definitely not my thing, and I sat through the first half thinking what a jerk Thomas was, and wondering how on earth young aspiring models could be so silly. Then the photo blow-ups made the whole thing seem a lot more interesting, before it all seemed to crumble away again, leaving something decidedly unsatisfying. And yet intriguing.

There seemed to be so many unanswerable questions.

Why his interest in antiques and doss houses? Why did he buy the propeller? Why did he - a professional photographer - not take his camera with him when he went to view the body? Why did the body not seem like that of a person who had been shot? Why didn't he call the police? And so on.

Anyway, here's my take on it.

The world he lives in is a world of images, not concrete things, and he finds it fundamentally unfulfilling. Hence he is often irritable and impatient at work and he takes it out on the models. He has a deep need to touch reality, to feel life in the raw as a counterbalance to the superficial and empty life he actually leads. The propeller and other antiques are things he can touch, and form a connection with to other people who had touched and owned them. The propeller possibly also subconsciously suggests the shape of a corpse to a mind that yearns for real things and real events and connections to people. It's significant that instead of photographing the corpse, he touches it. Had he photographed it he would have seen that it didn't exist. His mind creates it because he wants it to be there. A reality, not an image, and moreover, a thing which is connected to people he has seen. Like the tennis ball which he picks up at the end and throws back to the players. His eyes follow it as it moves from one player to the other, a product of his yearning for real things and connections, though it doesn't actually exist.

I've heard so much about this movie over the years that I felt I just had to see it before I died. What a disappointment! Holly Golightly is not even a very nice person. How many really nice (and I mean nice rather than cute) people throw their cat out into a dark wet alley and tell it to fend for itself, or describe a man, whom they'd been hoping to marry just because he was super rich, as having a face like a pig (after she discovered he was broke)? She dismisses many of her dates as rats and super-rats, but she's little more than a gold-digging escort girl herself. Hardly something to be proud of.

The first half-hour was somewhat amusing. After that it descended into a great deal of silliness. Holly became so shallow that it was difficult for me to see where love came into it, and I began to feel sorry for "Fred" having to spend the rest of his life with her. Perhaps he'll send her back to Doc or even down to Brazil to pursue ever sparser seams of gold?

After watching this film again I read the book. The screenwriter has chosen to place an emphasis on the difference in class between Lady Franklin and Leadbitter, which confuses the plot. In the book version, she is a liberal who dislikes class distinctions, and he is a businessman who sees himself capable of becoming as rich as she is. She admires and respects him (and loves him in a sense), but her romantic inclinations are towards men who need her (weak men), and not towards someone as self-sufficient and strong as Leadbitter. Leadbitter brings her out of her depression, but he then mistakes her gratitude for love.

The man she falls in love with in the film is nothing like the man she loves in the novel. In the novel he is a more-or-less penniless painter, whom she hopes to help to realise his full (as she sees it) potential.

I think Hartley was in one sense showing that Leadbitter and Lady Franklin were able to overcome the class barrier even if they weren't able to become romantically involved. I doubt that he would have liked the film, despite the powerful acting.

I seldom have watched a movie where I had so little sympathy for the characters in it. Justine, in particular, struck me as being thoroughly selfish and objectionable. Whatever internal pain she feels, she doesn't hesitate to take it out on those around her, including her (favourite?) horse. It seems she'll shag anyone, even on her wedding night. Yet, this apparently is all OK because she's depressed. Sorry, no...don't agree. In my view it's partly because people such as herself get given so much consideration (as from her feeble, long-suffering sister Claire) that they behave the way they do. They never have to face up to their own responsibilities.

She would have got little sympathy from me, and had I witnessed her cruelty to her horse I might have been tempted to take that whip to her own over-indulged behind.

I've seen this film a few times over the years. When I was younger I could relate to Colin Smith to some extent, having spent 10 years in an authoritarian boarding school in my youth. However, I now tend to look at it with a more critical eye.

It puzzles me that Sillitoe chose to use the word "loneliness" in the title, since Smith obviously gets some pleasure and comfort from his running. I don't know the answer but perhaps the "loneliness" means "isolation" or "alienation". A barrier that simply can't be overcome.

The governor of the borstal actually strikes me as being quite a kindly man, and seems to have some genuine interest in Smith's welfare. Perhaps he feels that by showing the borstal boys that they can compete favourably with boys from more privileged backgrounds it will help to break down what they may view as an impassable (and possibly unjust) class barrier and give them some confidence going forward in life.

In the case of Smith, this turns out to be a complete failure. Like his father before him who proudly spurned medical attention (and died soon afterwards - there's no pride like the pride of the poor!), he spurns the opportunity to take himself out of his condition. Though this no doubt gives him some momentary satisfaction, he will probably look back on it with regret in the grim grim years that lie ahead.

Whatever Sillitoe intended, it still has power and relevance today.

Tony Montana was a man who wanted to get married and have children.

He had some excellent qualities. He had incredible courage. How many people could watch their friend being carved up with a chainsaw and then spit defiance into the face of the man who did it? He was honest and forthright. He loved kids. He loved his sister. And his friend Manny.

Somewhere along the line he came to the belief that in order to get married to the most suitable woman you would need to have lots of money. So get rich first. With all the trappings - the boats, the fancy cars and gaudy residences (and, of course, tigers) - which are likely to attract the right sort of woman. But how do you achieve that if you have no education or skills? Well, crime of course.

So there was the man who wanted to get married and have kids and the man who wanted to get rich. And gradually these two individuals grew apart and began to destroy each other. As the movie progresses he turns into some kind of bloated monster, snorting his way like a pig through ever-growing piles of coke as he begins to realise that the vast sums of money he is making are not delivering the things he at heart wanted. Moreover, he is less and less happy and snaps at every little thing. The filming is deliberately over the top, from the comical and tastelessly gaudy furnishings of his home, to his boorish and drunken behaviour at an up-market restaurant. His wife (who is not a dumb blond) despises him. His close associates cringe in embarrassment (and fear) at his ridiculous antics.

He knows all this and hates himself for it. But he can no longer escape. He has reached the pinnacle of his financial success and he must go on. Yet, from time to time we hear from the other Tony Montana. He keeps asking after Elvira after she leaves him. At the last moment he refuses to assassinate a hostile journalist because there are kids in the car.

Under all the strain (and cocaine) he becomes more and more confused. He is out of his depth. Drowning. He sees himself shoot his best friend and destroy his beloved sister. With another mountain of coke up his nostrils and a suicidal bravado he takes on several dozen people who have been sent to kill him. Realizing the emptiness of what he has become he is out to destroy himself, and he succeeds in this in the end with a melodramatic belly-flop into his own swimming pool. This last is so ludicrous that it's amusing, but that's the person he has become - a man consumed by power, drugs and greed, leaving the other Tony Montana somewhere else along the way.

I don't like to see violence in films when it's there to titillate the audience. This is a violent movie because it depicts violent criminals. It's also a movie about a good and talented man who could have been happy with so little but fell into the wrong company. Brilliantly portrayed by Al Pacino.

..now you lie in it.

This is what Robert seems to be telling Diana as he packs her off back to her self-made prison on the Isle of Capri, where she performs the role of the beautiful face which "represents" the wife of Prince Cesare Della Romita. The role is so superficial that he (the prince) boldly tells Diana he is visiting his mother when in likelihood it is a mistress who will receive the benefit of his charming company. His children blow goodnight kisses at her from a safe distance while she dines alone at a vast table served by a parade of solemn servants.

Yet superficial is exactly how you could describe Diana herself. She is immature. She tells lies, most especially to herself. She hardly ever seems to finish anything she starts. She flits like a butterfly from one man to another and tells herself it is all good clean fun. One minute she is shedding tears over her pet fish ("poor little things"), the next she is trying to stab them with a knife (finally she and a drunken Malcolm poison them and apparently find it hysterically funny).

The only one of her acquaintances who seems to be normal and in any way sincere is Robert. She is a little afraid of him because she knows that he sees through her. However this doesn't stop her from picking him up and dumping him several times. Until he finally grows weary of it (despite his inability not to love her), probably realizing that she will never change and that life with her would no doubt be a pile of pain. If you're out fishing and you happen to land a conger eel into your little boat, the best thing is to get it overboard as quickly as you can even if it hurts.

The main characters and the decadence of the world which they inhabit are brilliantly portrayed. Though of course the movie seems dated in some respects, the themes are timeless. Recommended.

When watching this movie one has first of all to appreciate that it was made in the sixties when many actors sounded as though they'd just come out of acting school at Oxford. This results in the manager of a hairdressing salon sounding as though she'd once been a headmistress at a public school for girls, and most people in the pub sounding as though they were taking a short break from classes at Eton. That said, the dialogue is mundane in the extreme. A couple of attempts at jokes sound forced and miss the mark. The characters, aside from the heroine herself, seem shallow and type-cast. Is it at all possible that you could find a landlord who wasn't continually screaming blue murder for the rent? Then, there is the heroine. Looking increasingly pale and nervous she totters about like a badly shorn sheep, continually waving something-or-other away from her nose. Is the air that bad in London? Or is it that dead rabbit which she carries about in her handbag? One feels she should be somewhere else. Like a hospital?

Which brings me to my second point. Almost certainly, in my view, one is likely to appreciate this movie better if you are a) female and/or b) inclined to be subject to phobias of one sort or another (it probably doesn't matter which particular phobia). In this case the sight of hairy arms suddenly bursting out of walls could be rather frightening. In my case, since I am both male and not subject to phobias, it merely looks ridiculous.

I have to admit to being disappointed, having read so many rave reviews about this movie. I was, above all, hoping for some more intellectual and subtle approach to the subject. Instead we get walls cracking before our very eyes and rapists appearing out of nowhere. The only plus side from my point of view was the sight of Catherine Deneuve in her nightdress, which we see quite a lot of. Having said that, there is something sexless about her here, a far cry from "Belle de Jour".

This movie came out when I was just 15. Although I heard and enjoyed the music many times in various places I always assumed that it might have been a boring flick about peasants dancing on a beach. Browsing about in IMDb one day I read the storyline, decided it might be worth seeing it and ordered the DVD version.

Having read a number of glowing reviews I started watching it with anticipation. Zorba appears quite early on in the movie and straight away I found him irritating. Had I been Basil he'd have been given the brush-off pretty quickly. I've travelled quite a bit and I've come across many Zorba-like characters. Somewhat larger than life, full of grandiose gestures, familiar to the point almost of rudeness, oozing out lies and charm. A lovable rogue? Maybe, but how much of him is genuine and how much something he is capable of concocting in a moment? A man too, who admits he has raped and killed. You should be aware - and this movie actually illustrates it rather well - that associating with such characters will likely be your ruin.

But, never mind, you can always dance! As of 2013 the Greeks are not dancing. Instead they are hurling stones and insults at their governing institutions, as the pack of cards they built up around them collapses. Perhaps in the past there have been too many Zorbas and not enough people who don't tell lies, won't steal your money or foist their crazy ideas upon you.

So was it a boring movie about peasants dancing on a beach? Boring (with some notable exceptions, such as the truly horrific moment when the widow is brutally murdered), yes. But not peasants. Madmen. Quite, quite mad.

Yes sir, if you have the slightest suspicion that someone (e.g. one of your childhood friends) has murdered your daughter, it is perfectly OK these days (according to our esteemed director) to get together a couple of your thuggish cohorts (adult this time) whom you spent time with in prison, get the fellow (back to the childhood friend now) tipsy then stab him in the stomach and blow his brains out. This is not merely OK but downright reasonable behavior, and manly to boot. As what were you doing except avenging the death of your beloved daughter? Not only will this cause your wife to want to have passionate sex with you but you will also have supposedly law-abiding detectives turning blind eyes and deaf ears in just about every direction you can think of.

Of course murder (and indeeed the sordid history of child abuse) usually has a long chain of cause and effect. In this particular case, the murder weapon was previously involved in a number of criminal activities in which our avenging superhero was also implicated. So we could say that he was in fact more responsible for the death of his own beloved daughter than was his childhood friend, and perhaps he should have taken the aforementioned weapon to himself and shot himself down like a dog.

But then, we wouldn't have a superhero and hardly much of a story. And where would Hollywood be without violent crime and retribution? Or sex?

Such is the power of the gun in modern America.

The makers of this movie seem to have crafted it in such a fashion as to conjure up as many sub-plots involving sex, violence and double-dealing as could reasonably fit in a 2-hour spell. In so doing they created an extremely fast-paced thriller with more twists in it than a mole's living quarters. Which no doubt will appeal to a certain type of movie-goer.

However as a result the film loses much of its moral authority. Take, for instance, the episode where the house in which Ellis has been hiding is bombed. Almost immediately afterwards we see her singing happily without apparently a care in the world and her only remark regarding those (including half a dozen or so children) who had been sheltering her was to say she was relieved that she no longer had to read boring passages from the Bible to earn her keep. Hmm. In another episode several resistance men are badly beaten and then dragged off by German police but this seems to leave little impression on her. Even after her whole family is murdered she throws herself into the role of tart to the Germans with unlikely enthusiasm.

Though her acting in the role of tart is superb, as a heroine she seems to be distinctly lacking in intelligence. She seems constantly to be out-of-depth. Manipulated by others, she never seems to have a coherent plan of her own, and frequently allows herself to be led into traps. There are the seeds in this story of a great cat-and-mouse thriller if she had been allowed to have a bit more brain and a bit less of the other. This could have taken the movie way above the general Hollywood fare. However the authors seemed to have aimed for the box office. A great pity, given the excellent standard of photography, dialog and acting throughout.

The climax of the movie when she is turning the screws in the coffin is just ludicrous.

I want to say right off that I think that the photography is by far the best part of this movie and is outstanding in every respect. Since many others have commented on this in far better prose than I'd be able to produce I won't go into it.

A reviewer has suggested that the taxi driver was "detestable" as though he was in some way "asking" for his own death. I can't agree. He was just an ordinary human being with good and bad points - for example he gets pleasure out of feeding a stray dog.

Other reviewers have suggested that the young murderer regretted committing the murder. Once again, I don't agree. In his conversation with his lawyer we are called upon to pity his predicament. Yet he makes no inquiry about the taxi driver or his family. Quite clearly he didn't care less about him, any more than he cared about the possible consequences of dropping a stone on a car on the motorway, or throwing someone into a urinal.

In my opinion he was a thoroughly dangerous young man from whom society needed to be protected.

However, the question this movie asks is whether the state achieves anything by committing an equally ugly killing. Since capital punishment is said not to deter killers, and society is already safe on account of the man's incarceration, the killing by the state seems at best pointless.

The only thing that might be said to be achieved by killing the murderer is that it saves the state the cost of keeping him in confinement. However there are other ways of achieving this - for example, by requiring the murderer to work in prison to pay for these costs. Therefore the killing can be in no way justified.

I consider this movie ultimately to be flawed because Kieslowski allows emotion to intrude. This is especially true in the last scene in which the young man's lawyer is seen to be crying.

I believe that these important questions about killing will only be resolved by society if it tackles them in an unemotional way.

By coincidence, the movie about the life of Timothy Treadwell corresponds very well to a short story I have been writing. The movie involves bears and my story involves fish, but that's just a detail. They are both tales about people who believed they could dominate nature.

Treadwell may have been a multi-faceted character, but my overwhelming impression of him is that of a man with immense ego. He "loved" the bears but only on his terms. He loved them not for their wildness or their intrinsic beauty (though clearly he adored the foxes) but for the fact that their presence in his"domain" increased his own feelings of self-importance. To all intents and purposes a social dropout, his relationship with them lifted him out of all of that and took him to insanely dizzy heights.

He invaded their domain and constantly pitted himself against them. He dominated them not with guns or whips but by his sheer presence. He gave them names and humanized them. In so doing, he transformed their domain into his and all the animals in his "kingdom" became his "subjects". The voice he uses when speaking to them is not that of a humble pupil of nature but that of a governess who loves her charges to distraction but only if they "do as they're told".

The fact that they were dangerous only increased his fascination with them. To feel that you have dominion over such large and ferocious beasts must be some ego-trip. Towards the end, when he rants against anyone who is "invading" his "kingdom", he clearly believes that he is one of the few humans who is able to live within the area which he termed the "Grizzly maze" unmolested. Although he doesn't say outright that he believes himself to be immune from the bears, the implication is there.

However, there comes a point in the late autumn when food is becoming scarce and a bear needs to put on weight quickly in order to survive winter hibernation. At such a point it might cease to fear even such a dominating individual as Treadwell.

For me, Treadwell was only an extreme example of the many people who try to mold nature to their own psyche. However, to give him his due, he would have been appalled (as was pointed out by the pilot who had transported him into bear territory) by the subsequent killing of the "killer" bear. This animal was summarily shot and the human contents of its gut placed in plastic bags and transported to California. These remains were then incinerated and the ashes flown all the way back to Alaska, where they were scattered around Treadwell's former campsite.

While I realize that this was done mainly in order to perform an autopsy, the fact that it was necessary only shows the extent to which such areas have been invaded by humans. Such is the relationship of modern humans with nature.

So many people look at nature and wonder at its harshness. Why would a bear eat her cubs? Why would a male kill the cubs of a rival? They fail to see that in nature it's the survival of the group which is important. In a bad year the cubs would not survive without the mother, yet she can go on to breed the following year. When a male wins a sexual contest against another it's important that all resources are diverted to the offspring of this superior male so as to ensure the group evolves with its environment. Humans are losing touch with these important issues and Treadwell deserves credit for some outstanding photography depicting these things.

One reviewer has mentioned the importance of the fact that the priest exists mainly on bread and wine. This seems to me to point to the fundamental theme in the movie. Because the movie doesn't simply portray the isolation of the priest from the community but also their isolation from him. In feeling isolated from him they resent him and treat him with some unkindness.

What is the priest's disease? Surely, it is not so much cancer as his own purity. He is too much a priest and too little a human being. He sees his suffering as being godliness. As though it is some necessary part of being a priest. He chooses to suffer for the sake of his religion, whereas Christ endured his suffering because he had no choice.

The priest hardly ever smiles. He looks out upon sinful humanity from the purity of his little room at the top and there is a great gulf between himself and them. He cannot relate to them nor they to him. In practicing his religion with youthful earnestness he overlooks one important fact. Jesus was above all a human being. He surrounded himself with humans, ate and drank with them, laughed and wept with them. He certainly knew that they sinned, but he also understood the reasons for it, and saw his role as that of the shepherd who cajoles his flock along the correct path, rather than that of someone who draws lines in the sand and says "This you must not cross". Above all, Jesus had compassion, a quality not so much lacking as suppressed by the young priest. In doing so he is unable to offer the daughter of the manor the love (NOT romantic love) which she yearns for.

I have been reading postings on several websites about this movie, and it seems that everything from the roots of Egyptian civilization through Buddhist cycles of suffering and rebirth to ancient Christianity are somehow to be associated with it via a myriad of symbols and subtle hints (doves flying overhead, statues of angels, etc).

OK. So what? I don't deny the movie is skillfully crafted, but let's try and see it in perspective. James Cole (JC) may have been intended to "represent" Jesus Christ, and his mission and subsequent death to "represent" the coming and the crucifixion of Christ. However, anyone less Christlike is difficult to imagine. While Jesus was an intelligent and gentle man with deep insights into the politics of his time and a full awareness of the significance of his presence on Earth, James Cole is a man of moderate or even limited intelligence who is full of repressed violence, is frequently confused as to his own mental state and has limited understanding of the significance of what he is trying to achieve (and in fact a limited desire to carry his mission through). In my view, it's vitally important for humans to grasp the significance of these differences.

My mother came in while I was watching this movie and she said for shame I ought to turn it off right away. Which of course I didn't.

Later I explained to her that it wasn't all violent. No sir, not by a long shot (if you'll pardon the expression). I mean you had this scary looking fellow going round killing people with a cattle bolt gun (or a shotgun, depending on his mood at the time). Every occasion you saw that thing with its long shiny cylinder you knew someone was going to get their chips and end up with their ass a lot further underground than when they started. I have to admit I was beginning to wonder if there would be anyone left alive in the State of Texas if they didn't catch him pretty damn quick.

But in between the killings there were these downright interesting conversations where they talked about the way things were and the way they are now and how things went from father to son and stuff like that. Must admit I've forgotten some of it now but it had my full attention at the time.

If the movie had a slight flaw it was that you didn't see the moment when Carla Jean got hers. I mean you'd spent the better part of two hours witnessing what that old bolt gun could do both to the human flesh and even to more than a few doors (and some of those looked pretty solid to my eye). And while the scary fellow was sitting there tossing that coin and trying to make her call I couldn't help wondering when he was going to get that thing out and start making a few holes in her. I even went through all the extra stuff on the DVD (though by this time my mother was hollering for me to come down to supper - she's been trying to get me to find a place of my own ever since I turned forty) to see if I could find it, but it looks like they cut it out for some reason.

Well, I guess that's about it - have to get on down to the drugstore to buy a few more shells for my pump-action Beretta shotgun. I like to keep it under my bed in case my mother turns bad on me.