Final cut

...As the very solid and funny spirits verbally grope through their lifetimes in search of memories, simultaneously we feel the painful evanescence of all human existence and the preciousness that even the dullest lifetime can contain if only the liver could learn how to grasp it...

...And this fatuous performance is entirely representative of the entire movie, which never once stops wagging its tail while slobbering all over your sensibilities...

...Drama demands that time run out—Oedipus must identify the killer of Laius before the plague wipes out Thebes...

...So, at the movies, eternity must be finessed...

...If this sounds a bit twee, I can only assure you that after life isn't...

...tease and torment us poor mortals with their cute little poltergeist hijinks...

...Obedient chairs remain on duty at attention, and sleeping rugs stay territorial as ever...

...Cincinnati, OH 45233 www.msj.edu COLLEGE OF Mohr S I. JOSEPH Commonweal 2 I February 13, 2004...

...The defense remonstrates that English-speaking people on both sides of the Atlantic can, should, must learn to stand together to defeat Nazi evil, and therefore the romance must be al-lowed to flourish as a confirmation of Anglo-American solidarity...

...The spirits watch the movies, absorb the bliss of their chosen moment, and de-part into eternity endlessly reliving that single episode...

...We bury it enfolded softly in its wings like every bird in death...

...Whatever moment a spirit chooses pinpoints the center of that spirit's character...

...Thinking about death: Part 2 FINAL CUT Hollywood does the afterlife Richard Alleva hether heavenly or hellish, the afterlife presents moviemakers with one big headache: eternity...

...But is its heavenliness supposed to be intensified by the fact that the colors in it remain, literally, paint that Chris must squish through, while a bird that poops on his shoulder poops paint...

...and enjoys the delights of heaven until he learns that his spouse has killed herself and is condemned to...well, not hell, since this movie is determined with gritted teeth not to believe in hell, but to an extremely desolate place, full of smoke and mist and fire (oh, all right, already, it's hell...

...Panel of judges: playwrights, academics, theatre professionals...

...Surely a heaven for art lovers would be radiant with the beauty that art materials and techniques reach toward, but wouldn't be bogged down in the materials themselves...

...In What Dreams May Come (1998), directed by Vincent Ward from a Richard Matheson novel, you're zapped up to an Elysium not to await judgment but to relive the goodness of you...

...Spirituality Institute 2004 A week of lectures and courses centered on the theme: "Spirituality of Leadership" and featuring Geoffrey M. Bellman as keynote speaker...

...but, Which moment is the essence of you...

...But his survival wasn't just a miracle...

...The imminence of immortality reveals the poignancy of mortality...

...The film critic Parker Tyler saw a prophetic resemblance to the main assembly hall at the United Nations...

...Then he dies (another auto accident...

...The joke running through Defending is that the next world isn't so different from this one (only with fewer hassles), and that since the punishment awaiting the hero is simply another mortal lifetime, it's hard to care about the court's verdict...

...Joseph Courses can be taken for graduate, undergraduate or CEU credits...

...Commonweal 20 February 13, 2004 But what do I know...

...They are not angels but former mortals themselves who, at their deaths, could not settle on one moment to relive eternally and are therefore condemned to be only intermediaries, never dwellers within eternal bliss...

...In any event, Tony Blair should have screened this film for his rebellious Labourites at the start of the Iraqi war...

...Samuel Hazo of Life and Death in reverse...

...The question this movie finally puts to the viewer is not, What moment would you choose...

...Or maybe there is a dramatic flaw inherent in the premise...

...They both end up reincarnated as children who meet cute somewhere in...New Jersey, was it...

...In a way station somewhere between earth and eternity, five celestial caseworkers periodically interview recent arrivals in order to elicit from each the "most memorable or precious memory" of his or her life...

...Submission deadline: March 1, 2004 SEND SCRIPTS TO: National Play Competition c/o Department of Drama The Catholic University of America Washington, DC 20064 For further information, e-mail: 00gulla@cua.edu or visit our Web site at http://drama.cua.edu Sponsored by the Paul VI Institute for the Arts, Washington, D.C...

...Like bottles of patient wine they age in place and wait to share themselves with anyone...

...Here, the hero, Daniel (an adman killed in an car accident), wants to remain in heaven, but the celestial judges may drop him back to earth if their examination of his mortal days proves that he lived without conviction or emotional commitment...

...Four films of this kind come to mind: • From England, A Matter of Life and Death (American title: Stairway to Heaven), made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in 1946, is a patriotic World War II effort, but of a most peculiar sort...

...Oddly, part of the prosecution's case rests on the "fact" that, since Americans and Brits are essentially incompatible, the WAC-RAF romance mustn't influence the final decision...

...And the simplest way to do this is to turn heaven and hell into launching pads that send the spirits of the recently de-ceased right back into the world...

...The pause between wars the world calls peace is not their peace...

...What else but home restores us in the wake of acts of God or national catastrophes...

...plummets...

...It is not the novelty of after life's premise that finally en-chants the viewer but the way Hirokazu revels in the won-der of human-all-too-human personalities...

...However, this is the only movie I have seen that plausibly links the substance of human character to what we so glibly call "our eternal reward...

...Dreams won praise for its visuals, even from critics who derided its script...

...Top two plays to be produced, Spring 2005 *Top 10 entries receive cash prizes and publication in an anthology...

...Jordan (1941) and its remake, Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait (1978), a dead athlete gets sent back from the pearly gates to fulfill his truncated career but also manages to repair in-justices on earth...

...Later we find the cardinal that died colliding with our kitchen window...

...Miraculously, he survives and the bonding develops into love...

...Perhaps Brooks expended all his comic genius setting up the premise and had nothing left for a follow-through...

...For a complete list of courses and registration information, visit www.msj.edu/spirituality...

...The birch beyond the driveway tell us why our house is not an igloo or a hut...

...Running time 50 minutes or less...

...The way station isn't a cloudy paradise but a very solid, dingy stone country house much resembling the sort of place a modestly funded think tank would provide its scholars for a summer retreat...

...This memory will then be recreated on film by the interviewers...

...Just the opposite happens in An Angel on My Shoulder (1946), when dead gangster Paul Muni promises kingpin Lucifer that he'll use his second terrestrial tour to ensnare more souls for hell...

...Opened, they seem the same as doors extending welcomes, page after page...

...So modestly funded that when the residents plug too many hair dryers into the wall sockets, the lights go out...

...While clocks repeat their treadmill trek of going nowhere by the numbers twice a day, the furnace hums the only tune it knows...

...His wife, another paragon but more fragile, attempts suicide but is restored to hope by one good heart-to-heart with her husband...

...That is why the caseworker Shiori gently guides a teenaged girl away from her first choice of the "Splash Mountain" ride at Disneyland and toward a moment that expresses the girl's love for her mother...

...A lecture entitled "The Grace of Leadership" will be offered Tuesday evening, 7:00-9:00 p.m., by S. John Miriam Jones, S.C...

...Where else did Churchill go in his defeat but back to what he fondly called his "habitation...

...Only a dedicated parliamentary orator would opt for this particular Great Beyond, and it's no wonder Niven feels so anxious to get back to his sweetheart...

...Since the hero's wife is an artist and art restorer who shared her vocation with her husband, Chris strolls through a heaven that contains echoes of several artistic masters...

...In It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Clarence, the apprentice angel, gets his marching orders, while Adam Sandler as the devil's son in Little Nicky (2000) must prove himself by climbing up to earth through the New York subway system, which doesn't strike him as being much different from home...

...Yet, whereas Matter continued to charm during its climactic trial scenes, Defending falters when Daniel goes before the court...

...at high noon, the train arrives and Gary Cooper must face his enemies—but in eternity time never runs out...

...The gulp of faucet-water being swallowed by an unplugged drain in a swirling funnel mimics the treachery of suckpools and whirlwinds...

...Chris (Robin Williams), a wonderful doctor, perfect husband, ideal father, loses both his children in a car crash...

...June 20-25, 2004 College of Mount St...

...In Here Comes Mr...

...the restaurants force magically nonfattening portions on the guests...

...where Chris, having braved armies of demons, once more redeems her with an-other heart-to-heart...

...He (Brooks) has fallen in love with another recently arrived soul (Meryl Streep) whose obvious qualification for higher existence will separate him from her forever if the verdict goes against him...

...The first third of Defending charms because of Brooks's inventiveness in creating a heaven that is pure Southern California: the weather stations can do nothing but report that it's seventy-four degrees and clear all day, every day...

...Unlocked, an opening door extends its own welcome...

...What Dreams May Come gives us a do-it-yourself afterlife, an Etch-a-Sketch in excelsis...

...Even when he is eulogizing his son at the funeral, Williams seems concerned only with how deft and poignant he him-self is...

...Department of Religious Studies 513-244-4496 5701 Delhi Rd...

...If all our books were people once, we house a thousand people underneath one roof...

...The action is always liminal: at the threshold between two worlds, human beings and supernatural agents can interact, passports into eternity can be scrutinized, bar-gains struck, sins redressed, the fates of loved ones negotiated, entire human lives traced like routes on road maps...

...It casts its spell through close observation of manners rather than with special effects, and the sense of wonder it communicates seems grounded in some strange combination of Buddhistic tranquility and Chekhovian humanism...

...and the Past Life Pavilion is hosted by Shirley MacLaine...

...A Matter of Life and Death is a sweetly pompous movie, a cinematic eccentricity that only the British could concoct...

...Yes, 1946 seems a late date for all this, but perhaps the moviemakers had heard grumbles of "overpaid, over-sexed, and over here" from their countrymen about GIs...

...There are also a handful of movies, however, that use the life to come not as a launching pad but as a creator of perspective...

...An RAF pilot (David Niven), caught in a burning plane without a parachute, bonds by walkie-talkie with an American WAC (Kim Hunter) just before he Richard Alleva writes on films, media, and culture for Commonweal...

...We're seeing what we choose to see," a veteran spirit informs Chris...

...After all the visual bombast of Dreams, what a relief to see after life (note the lower-case spelling of the title for this proudly minor movie), written and directed by the young Japanese master, Kore-Eda Hirokazu (1998...

...Would evil people be allowed to take happy—happily evil?—moments into eternity...

...it was a supernal gaffe: Niven had been earmarked for death...

...We can't know because there is no sense of evil in the movie...

...They are our truest natures peacefully in print in perpetuity...

...and its limitations...

...Robin Williams wears the same self-pitying, moist-eyed, cocker spaniel look he puts on for all his "serious" roles...

...He has mingled actors with nonprofessionals, and every single one of them opens up to the camera with a directness and spontaneity usually displayed only by children...

...Albert Brooks's Defending Your Life (1991) is A Matter Up, up & away COLUMBIA CLASSICS Commonweal 19 February 13, 2004 At Home Two decades of hell could not convince Odysseus to think of Ithaca as just another island...

...This little masterpiece has its lunacies (why is it necessary for the memories to be restaged and turned into film clips...

...And just think of all those movies—Topper, A Guy Named Joe, Ghost, even The Sixth Sense—in which dead people, empowered by the perks of deadness (invisibility, ability to walk through walls, etc...

...The five caseworkers are certainly kind to and patient with their charges, but also limited by their own vanities and idiosyncrasies...

...CALL SUBMISSIONS Pia ywriting Competition The Department of Drama invites playwrights to submit one-act plays that focus on Catholic religious themes...

...As befits the debate that takes place there, Matter's heaven seems designed for forensics, and possesses a cold, stream-lined spaciousness...

...While his body lies on an operating table, his spirit is summoned before a heavenly tribunal to defend his right to live...

...In short, heaven and hell are useful places to set up the plot, but the real action is always right here on earth...