The reason this is such a fantastic documentary is it doesn’t consist primarily of boring interviews and stultifying background information. This is almost pure performance art. And it’s unique.
There’s a reason that a certain set of movies is released at the end of the year, around Oscar voting time, and another set is released….sometime after. Right about now. Nobody even remotely expects this thing to win any awards for anything. But who cares? It’s Hollywood, so get the 3-D glasses, go buy some popcorn, bring the kids and lower your expectations and you’ll be fine.
This thing is neither fish nor fowl. It tries to be both an action movie and a romantic comedy, somehow simultaneously, but not surprisingly, it has a little difficulty sustaining believability when it so easily flip-flops between one mode and another. After a while, we get the impression that it’s all just a big act, which of course it is, but somehow it lacks something along the lines of the necessary suspension of disbelief.
Yes, you have to remember that the original three (1977-1983) are now called IV,V, & VI, and what is now called I (1999) actually serves as a prequel, with II and III completing the back story leading up to the originals.
Gina Carano has developed an interesting pathway to Hollywood: through being a professional fighter. And a good one. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that she’s good-looking, in a girl-next-door, slightly hard-edged but still a little vulnerable kind of way. You might even enjoy a lunch date with her. You just wouldn’t want her after you.
Mavis Gary is a pathetic character, and yet, somehow, we care about her. She’s self-centered, delusional, amoral, depressed, addictive and self-destructive, but she wants so desperately for the world to be as she wants it to be, rather than how it is, that we almost wish it with her.
We feel for Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg). In his younger years, he led a life of crime, but somehow he has been able to get out of “the life” and go straight, without anybody coming after him, either the law or his former cohorts. His successors in the international smuggling business have apparently felt no need to eliminate him as a potential informant.
Will There Be Faith? A New Vision for Educating and Growing Disciples
by Thomas H. Groome
New York: Harper Collins. 384 pages
reviewed by JAMES F. CUBIE
Thomas Groome is a wise practical theologian who has written a superb book on how to do educational ministry that gives both a compelling, systematic vision of the theology that should support any practical effort to educate and grow disciples, and leads its reader through a series of personal and communal questions that relate directly to how a church operates day-to-day.
