Creation

From the TIFF website:
Featuring riveting, impassioned performances from real-life couple Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, Creation is a profoundly humanist rendering of the story of a man whose scientific ideas famously and irrevocably changed the world.

It’s 1858 and Charles Darwin (Bettany) has returned from his far-flung geological explorations on the HMS Beagle to settle into a quiet life in the British countryside. He begins work on On the Origin of Species, destined to become perhaps the most widely read book of natural science. In it, he outlines his theory of evolution through natural selection, inspired by discoveries about the transmutation of species that dispelled the prevailing religious beliefs of the day. After receiving a twenty-page letter from Alfred Russel Wallace describing similar theories, Darwin forges on to finish and publish his work. Met with instant success, the book enacts a paradigm shift within Darwin’s lifetime, inaugurating a new era in biological science

My take:
In the blurb above, I don’t think the reviewer uses humanist in the same sense that I might. I think she meant Darwin, the human behind the controversy. When I think humanist, I think of it in the context of… well I suppose secular humanism and rational thinking. Thats not what this movie is about.

A large part of the movie focuses on Darwin dealing with his daughter’s death. There is a scene in which he loses his belief in god. My take-away from the movie was that Darwin lost his belief in god because he was angry with god and could no longer believe in a creator that took his daughter from him. It was presented as the tipping point. Not necessarily because he found a better answer, and filled in the god gap. I hope this wasn’t the case. I don’t know that Darwin did lose his belief in a god. If he did, I used to like to think it was because of the evidence at hand, not out of pique.

I hear that some churches in Europe are going to be showing this movie to their congregations, and I’m sure the same will happen in the United States as well. I think they might come away thinking that Darwin lost his faith because of his daughter’s death, and that On the Origin of the Species was a cathartic effort by him to overcome his grief.

My favorite quote from the movie was Thomas Huxley to Darwin: “You’ve killed god sir. Congratulations!”

Director Jon Amiel and writer John Collee were available for Q&A after the movie.
Paraphrasing director Jon Amiel: “Darwin was not a typical Victorian father. He gave his children free rein to explore, was close to them, and was the kind of father that indulged them. They would sit on his knees and play with his chest hair, that kind of thing. He also fostered in them a sense of inquisitiveness, taught them that it was ok to ask questions, and not alright to accept things you’re told at face value, without understanding”
The movie definitely did present a more human side to Darwin.

Writer John Collee is a former doctor, and I think he was able to bring some good insights to the script. A large part of the movie consists of Darwin and members of his family drifting in and out of the medical treatments fashionable at the time, which today seem horrific. For instance, we would never give a child mercury to cure a fever, but at the time it was common to do so. He was making a point about science progressing on, and theories evolving. Collee: “The scientific beliefs we have today will be laughable twenty years from now.”

The movie was loosely based on Randal Keynes’ biography of Darwin titled “Annie’s Box”. Keynes is Darwin’s great-great-grandson. John Collee also read much of Darwin’s letters and correspondence, and tried to incorporate that into the movie. The resulting Charles Darwin is definitely not what I expected, the screenplay has him almost schizophrenic in his loss at his daughter.

The orangutan Jenny was one of the real stars of the movie, and probably the most touching scenes involve her.

Some facts the director gave us, which weren’t in the movie:
- Darwin’s daughter died of infantile tuberculosis. Its good to know, you’re kind of wondering what she’s being treated for as the plot progresses.
- Darwin’s wife Emma edited, annotated and approved the final text of the first edition of On the Origin of the Species. Even though what it said were completely antithetical to her beliefs. The movie does employ some artistic licence with this fact.

I enjoyed this movie. Probably because I already know about some of the history of Darwin’s life, such as his voyage on the Beagle. Also, I care deeply about evolution, I believe I understand it as well as is possible for a non-biologist, and it makes sense to me. The evidence that supports it is credible to me, and it should no longer be controversial. I want to see it taught in schools and to see it generally accepted and studied. And through further study or research, if someone comes up with a better idea, a more credible one, I’d be willing to take a look and evaluate it on its merits. However, creationism is just a dead horse that we’re forced to keep beating, over and over, with no end in sight.

There is a another good take on the movie, from a slightly different angle, here.

People who don’t care about evolution one way or another and are just looking to get a good evening’s light entertainment will probably not enjoy this movie as much as I did. It won’t hold their interest the way it did mine.

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The Day God Walked Away

From the TIFF website:
Rwanda is the latest sorry chapter in history to benefit from cinema’s power. During the fifteen years since the 1994 genocide, there has already been a gathering tide of films seeking to understand the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. To date, those films have largely taken the form of epic, moral drama. The Day God Walked Away offers a new approach. Dry-eyed and disciplined, this remarkable debut follows one woman as the horror descends on her world. It is genocide in miniature, and all the more heartbreaking for that.

Jacqueline, a young Tutsi, works for a European family in Kigali. When the rampaging thugs draw closer to their home, the family members flee, leaving Jacqueline to hide trembling in the attic. Director Philippe van Leeuw constructs this sequence as a harrowing piece of experiential cinema, keeping close to Jacqueline in a confined space as threats come at her from all sides.

This wasn’t what I expected. I thought a movie like this was going to be genocide porn. It really was experimental.
Most of the butchery takes place off the screen, with the protagonist being able to hear it as she hides. The genocidal dialogue is believable. The director mentioned it was completely spontaneous, he showed up in Rwanda, gave the locals machetes and asked them to get in the genocidal frame of mind. Nothing can go wrong there I guess…

There was a survivor of the genocide in the audience, who asked the director what point he hoped to make with this movie. He said there wasn’t really a point. However, the idea came to him in 1994 when he was watching the news about the genocide on television, feeling helpless because there was nothing he could do. At the time he was researching the european genocide against jews during World War Two. He found that every time this happens, we say “Never Again” and then allow it to happen again a few years later. Europe, South America, Cambodia, Rwanda…

Most of the movie is about the protagonist’s spiral into despair. Its interesting, but gets trite after a while. You won’t come away with an appreciation of the intensity of the genocide and what it meant, necessarily. My take-away was that its more about the protagonists reaction to what happens to her. This movie doesn’t have much to offer most people, unless you’re a fan of experimental cinema.

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Daybreakers

From the TIFF website:
In the year 2019, a plague has transformed the majority of the world’s population into vampires. These vamps aren’t romanticized gothic heartthrobs who sulk in the dusk, but omnipotent overlords, ruling the earth’s economy and social strata with an iron fist. Humankind teeters on the brink of extinction, in danger of being either turned into vampires or captured and farmed for its precious blood, sold at premium prices. Without a steady diet of fresh human blood, starved vampires feed on one another and regress into terrifying feral beasts. As demand outstrips the supply of plasma, attempts to find a substitute before time runs out have been failures. If humanity dies from the vampires’ bloodlust, the dominant race will become savage animals.

This was a different, but good vampire movie. Humans are being used as resources. You can see the story as a metaphor for almost anything. Oil, Water, Factory farming, the list goes on. Willem Dafoe and Ethan Hawke were both great, however, having seen Willem Dafoe in possibly the role of a lifetime in Antichrist yesterday, I couldn’t fully appreciate him in this.

This has one of the best movie beheadings ever.

Its a good movie, I think it’ll do well commercially.