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 By Peter T. Chattaway
THE SUMMER is winding down, all the big blockbusters
have come and gone, and the last few horror movies and R-rated comedies
have come along to sweep up what’s left at the box office before
festival season begins and movies get serious again.
But a few noteworthy flicks are already out there, and
one of the more interesting is Man on Wire, James Marsh’s documentary about Philippe Petit and
his illegal high-wire walk between the World Trade Centre’s twin
towers in August 1974.
Wisely, the film never mentions the terrorist attacks
that brought the towers down in 2001. But it is impossible to watch the old
footage of the towers being built without remembering how their foundations
were exposed again so many years later.
And it is impossible to watch Petit and his friends
plan their “artistic crime” – a process depicted
partly through re-enactments and partly through the home movies they shot
at the time – without noting the similarities and differences between
their conspiracy and the one that shocked the world years later.
But where the terrorists conspired for the purpose of
death and destruction, Petit and his friends conspire to surprise the world
– or at least New York City – with a celebration of skill and
excellence, to bring a note of unexpected grace to people’s lives,
and to give everyone present a truly “once in a lifetime”
experience.
Alas, skill and excellence can sometimes go to a
person’s head, especially when fame is added to the mix, and the film
notes how Petit grew distant from his friends – especially his
girlfriend – after his famous incident atop the towers. (The film
briefly, but semi-graphically, recreates Petit’s first encounter with
a groupie.)
So Petit’s astounding achievement – his
“once in a lifetime” accomplishment – was a moment of
triumph, on one level, but in hindsight there is also something sad about
it. Petit’s high-wire act marked the end of a years-long obsession,
but it also marked the end of the thing that had kept his group together
for so long.
And what can a man do after he has conquered the
tallest buildings in the world? It’s all a little reminiscent of that
song from The Jungle Book in which the monkey king sings: “I’ve reached the
top and had to stop, and that’s what’s bothering me.”
* * *
I mentioned a few months ago that a movie about Billy
Graham and his increasingly skeptical colleague Charles Templeton was in
the works. Billy: The Early Years opens in American theatres October 10. An extensive trailer,
parts of which look somewhat over-the-top, can now be seen at BillyTheEarlyYears.com.
It recently occurred to me that Graham might turn up as
a character in yet another movie scheduled to come out in the next couple
of months.
Oliver Stone has promised that his George W. Bush
biopic, simply called W, will look at the role
Bush’s religious conversion played in turning him from a wayward
alcoholic into one of the key political figures of our time.
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Early reviews of the script indicated a conversation
between Bush and Graham would play a central role. But a recent report in Screen Daily indicates Stacy
Keach will now play “a composite of evangelical ministers, including
Billy Graham and Jim Robison.”
* * *
Technically, this is not a TV column; but where
speculative fiction is concerned, some of the most interesting stuff
happens on the small screen.
The first season of Terminator:
The Sarah Connor Chronicles indicated that the
series is explicitly tackling the biblical overtones which were only
implicit and allegorical in the original Terminator movies.
The series seems to be doing this largely through the
character of FBI Agent James Ellison, who has begun to wonder if the
apocalypse predicted in the Bible might be related somehow to the nuclear
war Sarah Connor is trying to prevent.
So it was especially interesting to learn that Richard
T. Jones, who plays Ellison, is himself a Christian, and that the producers
are deliberately exploring the religious stuff to incorporate Jones’
faith into the show.
Meanwhile, NBC is developing a series that
modernizes the biblical story of Saul and David and sets it in a parallel
universe, where cities like New York are governed by kings, not mayors or
governors. Ian McShane – best known for Deadwood now, but also for playing Judas in Franco Zeffirelli’s
Jesus of Nazareth –
will play the Saul character, while Christopher Egan will play the David
character.
Series creator Michael Green told SciFi.com the series
would be about “magic, faith, happenstance, luck, God,” adding:
“I look at it as the hand of faith guiding the heroes. I’m
curious to see how people perceive that. The ongoing discussions when
people see it are, ‘Is that magic? Did something just happen beyond
physics? Is it something special, or luck?’ I won’t answer
that, and will let people interpret that.”
– filmchatblog.blogspot.com
September 2008
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