Screen

...Rarely has so Gothic a plot device served such politically symbolic purposes...

...From all three segments, however, we get a clear idea of who and what's to blame for today's educational difficulties: _9 working mothers, who no longer maintain the "snugly intact" families of the fifties but have bought their freedom at the price " o f children left alone...

...There were, however, some welcome differences: greater attention, for example, to the question of teachers' salaries and generally to the costs of improvements and the unlikelihood that they can be achieved without federal assistance...

...On the other hand, we are instructed that they are stubborn creatures who will not agree with what everyone already knows: "once you're dead you're dead...

...It is solemnly renamed "the evil thing," and the bushman leader decides to go to "the edge of the world" to deposit the bottle and hope for no return...

...The nation is being threatened by a split between the haves and have-nots of unprecedented proportions...

...he then tries to draw close, and eventually lands a job at the farm of her Commonweal: 534 in-laws, the very spot where the initial murder was committed...

...For both of us, I hope, the conversation has just begun...

...Politics might determine one's reaction to Cal...

...true, it reflects that nation's power structure, with white hunters, teachers and biologists and black tribesmen, hunters, and, at best, mechanics...

...While the section on the changing family asserts a clearcut cause-and-effect connection between mothers working and children's lowered achievement, the relationship between TV-watching and achievement is presented in a nuanced and informative manner...

...9 "frustrated and stressed" teachers, demoralized by these "unwilling-to-learn" students, plus low pay...

...He suspects that any attempt to interpret such beliefs as true is finally an unconscious expression of "false consciousness," including the subtle interpretations of liberal theological "tinkerers...

...We live here, and they're trespassers," he comments succinctly, with much heat and some accuracy...

...When was there not...

...The worst violence in Cal occurs at the beginning, even before the initial credits, providing both powerful forward momentum and profound unity to the film...

...He first meets her accidentally when he hears her consoled by name in a library...

...True, it was produced in South Africa...

...Society demands that schools stick to " b a s i c s " -- or, in the loftier version, to "academics" -- while simultaneously relying on the school more than ever to be custodian and nurturer of children who increasingly lack other social sources of support...

...Commonweal: 536...

...But perhaps the questions have become a little clearer...

...The woman doesn't know: drawn to her by an uncertain mixture of love and guilt, Cal is trying to forget and forge some kind of healing reconciliation...

...Action for Excellence, issued by the National Task Force on Education for Economic Growth...

...Helen Mirren, an experienced British actress, received a Cannes award as Marcella, but is here mostly supportive of Jon Lynch, a young London actor raised in Northern Ireland...

...On the basis of his response to me, Thomas Sheehan's question seems to be this: is it really possible for any twentieth-century intelligent person to believe such central claims of Christianity as Jesus' resurrection...

...Furthermore, it might be interesting to ponder that those healthy teenagers of the fifties were the offspring of working women who manned our offices and factories during and shortly after World War H. And the young children raised by the stay-at-home mothers of the fifties grew up to be those spoiled and much-maligned kids of the sixties...

...The climax of the movie thus makes for a gentle, whimsical send-up of traditional cinematic bloody rescues and "final battles" (see, for example, the unintentionally hilarious version of such an apocalypse in the recently released Sheena...

...Elements of this scene are repeated in part or in full as Cal draws near the widow...

...If teachers are burnt out now in alarming numbers, nothing we see here helps us understand why, nothing in their classrooms suggests the kind of breakdown of morale and discipline the documentary bemoans...

...and some terrorist activities by black revolutionaries who, having failed in all their own non-exploits, kidnap the schoolteacher and her class...

...9 teachers' strikes and unionism, which has fostered mediocrity...

...Cal, however, is, at times, under-acted, under-written, and under-directed...

...In its stark counterpointing of love and war, it may be the most moving...

...Like his country, he's tied in knots...

...If Sheehan believes that such religious experience is impossible, or that any process of religious discernment is implausible, then let us discuss that...

...the charm of the movie is to make that believable...

...Each of these particulars could be challenged or at least seriously qualified...

...Despite these defects, Cal is easily one of the best movies this year...

...His performance is thoroughly understated: we have often to guess his emotions from his drawn, almost wounded face...

...The high-school English teacher's plea is heart-rending: if only they would "please look at me" with real interest . . . . But it is a refrain teachers have been chanting for generations...

...It can even be glimpsed in the sometimes gray-on-gray arguments of liberal theologians who attempt to give reasons for the hope and trust they experience--no more, no less...

...From The Informer, to Odd Man Out, to Shake Hands with the Devil, the "troubles" in Ireland have afforded sad raw material for powerful moviemaking on the complicated conflicts of loyalty that the IRA provokes...

...Moreover, the film relies too heavily on slapstick in its middle, with too many jokes on male klutziness with damsels in distress and too frequent resort to speeded-up "keystone cops" style jungle chase sequences...

...In reality, "To Save Our Schools" left me somewhere between a state of advanced discouragement and numb despair...

...A dry, laconic voice-over narration accompanies the story, at first suggesting mild amusement with primitive innocence, then gradually implying stronger satire on the ways of civilization...

...The woes voiced by the teachers in "To Save Our Schools" ring true -- but are they so new...

...We don't know exactly what he feels for Marcella, what mixture of love or guilt, what morbidity perhaps, what desire to heal where he once hurt...

...Media FEEDING OUR MYTHS "TO SAVE OUR SCHOOLS" FLUNKS I T WAS INEVITABLE...

...To deepen the movie this way requires involving the bushman, however, with two rather cliched subplots: a romance between a white biologist and a blonde schoolteacher on her first excursion into the wild...

...More seriously, there have been charges (and picketing) claiming that The Gods Must Be Crazy is racist...

...His desert is Eden...

...A Protestant sympathetically tells Cal after his house is burned, "There are bad bastards on both sides...

...Cal himself is beaten for no apparent reason by Protestant thugs, unaware of his IRA connections...

...although we see his disgust with the violence he helped perpetrate and his desire to leave the organization, we can only imagine that, initially, he had no sense of the gravity of the acts in which he was engaged...

...But if, as is more likely, all these are not the real questions he wishes to pose at all, then what are...

...Thanks to these factors, "our entire national future" is at stake...

...Also welcome was an emphasis on the threat of a two-tier system of schooling -- one for the middle class and one for the poor (always shown, however, as black and Hispanic although the majority of America's poor are white...

...Screen NOT-SO- FINAL BATTLES 'CAL' & 'THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY' B~ ~ HEY'RE PLAYING our song," the title character of Cal says mournfully over the sound of a siren to the a l l woman he loves...

...Schools are no longer the common cement between citizens, lifting successive generations into the middle classes...

...Later, the house he shares with his father in a predominantly Protestant development is firebombed by Ulster arsonists...

...These departures from the written reports are distinctly for the better, and as a schoolteacher I suppose I should be comforted by all this attention...

...If he believes that any talk of the resurrection of Jesus is either false consciousness, contrary to what we all know is possible, or that present theological interpretations of the Resurrection are a falsification of the New Testament statements, then let us discuss that...

...Each of the three segments -- on students, on teachers, on community response was preced~ by a barrage of dramatic and uninterrupted statistics, the kil/d intended to alarm rather than inform...

...He is, moreover, Stalinist in his tactics, employing sadistic killers who pressure Cal into operations despite his desire to bid farewell to arms...

...We are witnessing the "twilight of excellence...

...Making the Grade, from a Twentieth Century Fund Task Force...

...The pilot of a small plane passing overhead casually tosses out a Coke bottle, which, welcome at first as a useful tool to make music or mash fruit, becomes the first object of contention in the group's existence: unlike anything else in the Kalahari world, there is only one bottle of Coke, and surprising themselves, the bushmen battle for its possession...

...Jaime Uys, the Afrikaan film-maker, who wrote, produced, and directed The Gods Must Be Crazy, and 20th Century Fox, which released it here, deserve credit, not demonstrations for bringing N!xaw to us...

...I trust critical conversation and argument...

...Cal's problem is simple but symbolic: he's in love with the widow of an Ulster policeman whose assassination he abetted by driving a getaway car for an IRA gunman...

...So too was its franker acknowledgment that society is speaking, as Ernest Boyer at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching puts it, "out of two sides of its mouth...

...Personally embodying the contradictions of terrorist civil war in this acute form, Cal is both reluctant accomplice to murder and would-be redeemer...

...But even these questions suggested by Sheehan are caught in the paradoxes of his language...

...T HE GODS MUSTBE CRAZY is a genial mock heroic that, for the most part, successi~ully mixes ironic fable and jungle adventure-romance...

...On the basis of his arguments against that hope, Thomas Sheehan seems to be a reform-minded modem thinker with a strong religious sense...

...The film, adapted to the screen by the writer of the original novel, Bernard MacLaverty, seems to condone this sad view and provide no easy answers...

...The oppression of Catholics is to be sure, vividly depicted...

...Each time he peacefully drives up the road to the house he relives the process of delivering the killer--less an instance of the criminal revisiting the scene of the crime than a symbol of how Northern Ireland's consciousness seems riveted around some ancient, irredeemable wrong for which vengeance and vendetta can have no end...

...without explanation, the neat closure is implausible, to say the least...

...9 the fight over segregation, which disrupted once tranquil schools...

...Broadcast nationally on September 4, 1984, ABC's "To Save Our Schools, To Save Our Children" was the product of a year's research in four cities, and rounded up all the usual prestigious experts...

...9 a hedonistic youth culture featuring drugs and outside distractions including TV...

...They experience this reality in prayer, in worship, in word and sacrament, in reflecting on the New Testament narrations of that life, death and resurrection, and in every genuine attempt to live the kind of challenge disclosed in the New Testament documents of this Jesus of Nazareth...

...Cai is the first feature for Irish documentary-maker Pat O'Connor, but he needs to push to get more from his associates and material, and not assume, despite its eloquence, that it speaks for itself...

...But the humor is pretty much at everyone's expense, and the bushman, 5 October 1984:535 who brings sweetness and light wherever he goes, comes off best of all...

...How different can be glimpsed by anyone's reflection on the demands for what a truly human life might be in light of the ministry, message, actions, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth...

...The film isn't racist, but primitivist...

...It can be glimpsed in people' s attempt at Christian prayer, reflection, and action, like the prayer, reflection, and action of those "basic communities" of Christians in Latin America...

...Is it time for a moratorium on blaming women for not being there when they're needed...

...Theologians have also argued why this central belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is, by the very nature of the subject matter, a belief necessarily grounded in a contemporary religious discernment of discipleship and prayer...

...There are some technical problems with the film: the narration recounting the thoughts and activities of the bushman has appropriately been put into English for release here, but this means that the white actors, speaking Afrikaans in the original, must be awkwardly dubbed (you could hardly have subtitles given the previous English voice-over...

...9 "lowered standards...

...Fortunately, both for the hostage and the film, the bushman's superb tracking talents and his use of the biologist's sedatives comically and nonviolently save the day...

...and America's Competitive Challenge, from the Business-Higher Education Forum...

...I do not claim that the present conversation is resolved...

...An enthusiastic supporter of the IRA provisionals, or at least British withdrawal, would be sure to find much to criticize in its resolutely even-handed approach...

...The vast majority of working mothers, for instance, are not out there to exercize their new-found freedom but because they must work for their families...

...We are informed that the problem with theologians, docile creatures that they are, is that they may not be able to imagine anything really different from what the tradition tells them...

...To be a Christian (or better, with Kierkegaard, to attempt to become a Christian) is to risk a life on something radically different...

...Themovie, filmed in Botswana and produced in South Africa, first focuses on a group of bushmen in the Kalahari desert and details their quiet, hunter-gatherer lifestyle...

...The Ulster policeman whose wife Cal befriends answers his bell during Christmastime revels: happy and flushed from wine and song, he opens his door, is shot, then dies crying out his wife Marcella's ,name...

...But the "postliberal" devil he proposes seems, perhaps unconsciously, to propose an all-too-familiar modern liberal scenario: religion would be acceptable if only it did not make claims other than those we already know...

...It's a subject guaranteed to create cheap guilt, not reflection and insight...

...The quick scenarios mostly show children working silently alone, dutifully listening, or acting as though they were...

...But he leaves out the Ulstermen, as the IRA has always done...

...MacLaverty's otherwise excellent screenplay should not have left these gaps...

...Yet, there is disorder in some classes...

...I respect that option...

...Moreover, we don't know what motivated him to be a part of the original IRA hit squad...

...It was, in large measure, a filmed version of A Nation at Risk, the report prepared by the National Commission on Excellence in Education...

...It s only a snippet, but characteristic of the sad wit and economy that underlines the movie, the most touching film version of the troubles in Northern Ireland to date...

...its hero played by a Kalahari native (credited phonetically as "Nlxaw") is a stone age Charlie Chaplin, whose benign wisdom subtly underlines the craziness of the technologically superior "gods" around him...

...Cal is not as tragic as the first of these two predecessors, nor as fast-paced as the last...

...Even the plot has too many loose ends...

...TOM O'BRIEN (As of last issue, Tom O'Brien became Commonweal's regular movie critic...

...So does Thomas Sheehan...

...The local IRA leader evokes a sympathetic response when recalling the Londonderry "riot" of 1972, when British soldiers killed thirteen Catholics at what, until then, had been a predominantly peaceful demonstration...

...A year of reports about the crisis of American public schooling has culminated in a three-hour television special...

...The documentary's use of two upper-middle-class children mysteriously left to fend for themselves in their isolated suburban mansions, is a dubious way to build a case about the changing family...

...We are an "imperiled nation" and teaching is an "imperiled profession...