Screen
Alleva, Richard
the centrality of "the eschatological" and "the messianic" in the early Christian movement, and the integration of the mystical and the prophetic which these categories require. We have created a...
...Where is the Russian savor...
...Allen has become a technician of suave, easygoing power...
...RICHARD ALLEVA GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS Studies in Ethics Room 111, Intercultural Center Georgetown University Washington, D.C...
...his dedication and loyalty to the church pervade every page he writes...
...It seems to me that everyone connected with this enterprise was coasting: on their previous achievements, on the inherent power of the subject of individuals caught in the toils of cold warfare, on the reputation of le Carrr, on the current interest many intelligent people take in the miseries and splendors of glasnost...
...At the conclusion of the scene, I knew no more of why Alice had been drawn to this particular man than before it started...
...For once, the protagonist isn't a company man but an outsider, an innocent...
...He is fascinated by the insiders, the men with plugs in their ears and jargon on their tongues...
...How promising ! Cold war skullduggery experienced through the consciousness of an individual as naive as ourselves but then examined and commented upon by the eavesdropping professionals...
...She goes to a Dr...
...As the camera pans back and forth in the huge, flesh-toned apartment (that has a hall as big as a hotel corridor) the employees and acquaintances seem to spring out of the woodwork...
...it's meaningful and funny...
...And in that minute-and-a-half we see Alice greet and deal with her husband, children, physical trainer, decorator, cook, maid, and a member of a parent pool who has come to drive the kids to kindergarten...
...Rather, his body seems to seep into a dimly lit room from some reality beyond our reality...
...There is nothing of Russia in this film except monuments and statues...
...Allen the writer merely set Allen the director a series of technical tasks that the latter then dextrously fulfilled...
...So many traveling shots past Russian monuments...
...That's more than I cay say for The 4 Russia House...
...When Barley, disgusted with the deceits he has been made to perpetuate, rebels and starts acting without orders, the script veers away from his consciousness and stays with the cloistered agents...
...The case is the same for Alice's scenes with her sister: generic sibling needling and reconciliation...
...Allen again demonstrates his flair for using familiar actors in slightly eccentric ways...
...But that is, alas, its main virtue...
...Barley, an alcoholic, near-bankrupt publisher, is given a scientific manuscript by a disillusioned Russian military scientist who hopes to douse whatever remains of the cold war by giving away the fact of Soviet military inadequacy...
...When Dr...
...I was never startled by details of atmosphere or action...
...No idea in the story ever came close to the hair-raising implications of E.M...
...This single shot staging isn't just economical...
...Big Brain just for being in its audience, this adaptation of the le Carr6 book worked upon my midbrain like twenty extra-strength sleeping pills followed by a good mas158: Commonweal sage...
...2400 pp., Two volumes, ISBN 0-87840-490-2, cloth, $195.00 THE EVILS OF THEODICY Terrence W. Tilley NE~/T Professor Tilley argues that theodicy as a discourse practice creates evils while attempting to explain away evil as a theological problem...
...Fred Schepsi is one of the most acute directors alive and even here (notably in the first fifteen minutes when the agents are brainpicking a dazed, drink-sodden Barley) he does some inventive things...
...She dominates the supernatural visitors and special effects by never seeming too surprised by them...
...9 ut, at least while you're actually looking at it, _9 Alice lives...
...When the ghostly lover, Ed, appears, he doesn't just crudely materialize h la Topper...
...We have created a conversation among ourselves in which the claims of exegetes, historians, and philosophers can be brought forward thoughtfully and their implications for faith and self-understanding considered from different perspectives...
...Touted by its advertisers and by D some of the critics as the quality movie of the Christmas season, the film most likely to make you feel like Mr...
...SCREEN EMPTY HOUSES 'ALICE' & 'RUSSIA HOUSE' oody Allen's Alice is an anomaly: a cleverly written, fluently directed bit of fluff about a woman's spiritual transformation...
...240 pp., ISBN 0-87840-488-0, cloth, $25.95, ISBN 0-87840-489.9, paper, $14.95 RELIGIOUS SUPPORT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS A Global Faith in the Making NEW Robert Traer Professor Traer argues from empirical evidence that contemporary human rights discourse, which is global in scope, contains an affirmation of faith that has in fact united members of different religious traditions and cultures with secular humanists in a common struggle to establish human rights as the basis for human dignity...
...202) 687-6063 DECREES OF THE ECUMENICAL COUNCILS Norman P. Tanner, SJ., Editor This monumental, two-volume work brings together for the first time in the original languages and in a fresh English translation all the decrees of the ecumenical councils from Nicaea I to Vatican II, representing the most authoritative distillation of Christian tradition...
...In fact, I'm stuck with the impression that Allen wrote this script very quickly and too enthusiastically, with great enthusiasm for its magical devices but little insight into his own characters...
...He doesn't really care about Barley the outsider...
...The place is infested with affluence and the mousy Alice can't really deal with such hectic comfort...
...For instance, that reenacted first date with her husband-to-be I have praised for its avoidance of the clichts of flashback...
...Aurally, The Russia House is the son of Dr...
...Much of the magical stuff is accomplished delightfully...
...20057 Complete catalog available upon request...
...Contrast these scenes with the sisterly get-togethers in Hannah and Her Sisters where the siblings listen and don't listen to each other like particular women from a particular family...
...Such speaking is bread of life for all of us, good food for our souls...
...To be a responsible Catholic today, our thinking itself must be awakened by faith, grounded in faith, shaped by the imagination of a faithful heart...
...I haven't read The Russia House but, judging by the adaptation by Tom Stoppard, it must have been something of a departure for le Carrr...
...Barley is wired so as to relay his encounters back to headquarters...
...Mantegna's rough amiability suits well this role of a basically decent guy with strains of seediness and irresponsibility in his character...
...296 pp., ISBN 0-87840-508-9, cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-87840-511-9, paper, $15.95 THE CRITICAL CALLING Reflections on Moral Dilemmas Since Vatican II Richard A. McCormick, SJ...
...But where are the faces of the people o f Moscow and Leningrad...
...Doug simply appears in Yang's office and the couple create the reality of the past with words and glances as the doctor looks on...
...Zhivago...
...William Hurt has always had fatuousness as a color on his actor's palette...
...His knowledge of moral theology is encyclopedic and legendary...
...But the manuscript falls into the hands of British intelligence, whose agents then send Barley to Russia to check out the reliability of the dissident...
...The dialogue in it is nothing but generic courting conversation that could have been written by any apprentice playwright for any pair of cardboard lovers...
...But the superficiality of the script has infected his direction...
...To be sure, we see Sean Connery traipsing about Russia making contacts, but his actions become as bewildering to us as to the agents listening to him from thousands of miles away...
...In a pluralistic, historically conscious, politically awakened, and ecologically challenged world, in a world of too much suffering, and too much poverty, devastated by war after war, and darkened by the alienation between thought and spirit, Catholic theology continues to speak of faith and forgiveness, of God and more abundant life, of reason and love, of community and human solidarity, of the importance of worship and the symbolic imagination, of the demands of justice, and of hope for victims of oppression, even of hope for the dead...
...Such a battery of lush strings on the soundtrack...
...Yes, yes, I know Sean Connery's Barley redeems himself for love at the drnouement, but Connery is so lovably rumply and boozy-funny from the start that you know he has nowhere to go but straight toward amorous salvation by jumping the delicate bones of Michelle Pfeiffer...
...She's uneasy and there is an ache in her lower back that no expensive drug or massage can alleviate...
...Joe Mantegna brings to the part of Alice's musician-lover what he couldn't summon for his gangster in The Godfather III: a sustained, centered understanding of the man he plays...
...Forster's famous assertion about what he would do if called upon to choose between betraying his friend or his country...
...But, at the film's conclusion, when Dr...
...If so much in the film is good, why doesn't it reverberate within me...
...The problem may be this: none of Alice's magical transformations revealed her past or her mental life for me, and, without such revelation, her final conversion carries little weight...
...210 pp., ISBN 0-87840-491-0, cloth, $22.95, ISBN 0-87840-491-9, paper, $10.95 8 March 1991:159...
...Theodicists ignore or distort classic texts in the Christian tradition, unwittingly efface genuine evils in their attempts to justify God, and silence the voice of the suffering and the oppressed by writing them out of the theological picture...
...In order to "think what we are doing," from now on, we must all be involved in a renewed practice of theology...
...Yang of Chinatown who provides magic herbs that grant her, by turns, sexual boldness, invisibility, contact with the ghost of a former lover, advice from a literary muse, and (disastrously) the power to enthrall every single male at a cocktail party...
...No character in it revealed new facets after his/her first five minutes on screen...
...his powers of reasoning are characterized by rigor, incisiveness and prayerful reflection...We should all be grateful that there are such wise and prayful scholars in the theological act that is 'faith in search of understanding.'" -National Catholic Reporter 401 pp., ISBN 0-87840-463-5, cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-87840-404-3, paper, $10.95 THAT THEY BE ONE N [ ~ The Social Teaching of the Papal Encyclicals 1740-1989 Michael J. Schuck Honest in its assessment of contradictions and consistencies, this work provides a comprehensive historical analysis of the complete content and overall coherence of Roman Catholic encyclical social teaching...
...Appropriately, he dips his brush deeply into it for the part of Alice's heel of a husband...
...But the story gradually betrays le Carr6's real sympathies...
...Yang declares that Alice now has a better understanding of who she is, I'm afraid that I could only respond, "But I don't !"Alice has the strange distinction of being the least vivid good movie of the year...
...The result is often a theological legitimation of intolerable social evils...
...Yang has Alice relive her first encounter with her husband, there's no corny segue into flashback...
...Farrow has, as many have noticed, picked up some of her significant other's vocal patterns but these she uses with confidence and the sort of control that the more furtive Allen could never manage...
...It must be educated by the rigorous questioning and conversation of the whole community, in its critical, creative, repentant, and obedient appropriation of tradition...
...The late Keye Luke makes a great farewell appearance as Yang: he barks with unchallengeable authority...
...The movie makes everything easy for its hero by letting him betray and save his country simultaneously...
...When he introduces us to the hyper-yuppie couple, Alice and Doug Tate, in their East Side New York apartment, he does so in a single shot that lasts about ninety seconds...
...or Mrs...
...But his camera keeps gliding through immaculate locations without ever fastening on an interesting detail, an open countenance, a thought-provoking juxtaposition...
...Barley keeps talking of his great love for Russia...
...Glasnost made location shooting possible and Schepsi would have been crazy to shirk the opportunity...
Vol. 118 • March 1991 • No. 5
