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Reviews
Jude (1996)
Some movies are bad. This was a movie I hated.
In more than four decades of watching and enjoying movies, this film is at the bottom of the list. It's not that the film wasn't technically well made, had poor acting, or didn't translate its source material to the screen well. It was the content.
I watched the film as a college student around 1998 at BYU's International Cinema, which edited the graphic sexuality and nudity--I didn't even know it had originally been rated R. When I decided to watch it, I only knew that it was based on a classic 19th century novel, Jude the Obscure, and considering an education in the classics to be valuable, I decided to see it. Well, that day I learned that not all novels considered to be classics are uplifting and beneficial.
It's been a long time since I watched it, and I could overlook some aspects I didn't like, from the bleak, depressing tone, to the problematic central relationship and its effect on people around them. However, in one central scene, a scene that couldn't be excised and leave the plot intact, the main characters' young son, who is only about eight years old, hears his parents arguing about their financial and other problems, and misunderstands that he and his sisters are the source of his parents' difficulties. So one day soon after, his parents discover that their sensitive, thoughtful child, has taken it upon himself to help solve his parents' problems (and even now, this is difficult to write, particularly as a parent)--by murdering his two young sisters in their beds and then hanging himself.
To date, that scene is the single worst thing I have ever seen depicted in cinema. Shocking? Yes. Thought-provoking? Perhaps. The idea still haunts me to this day, nearly a quarter century later. Perhaps I'm writing this now as a form of late-night therapy.
One aspect of assigning stars in a movie review is to consider how well the viewer liked the movie. Based on that criteria, I have rated this movie with one star (one of only two). Jude is at the absolute bottom of all movies I have ever seen, and the only one where dislike is not a strong enough term to capture my feelings for it. This is the only movie I have ever hated.
Brigham Young (1940)
A good movie--Heber J. Grant's thoughts
I just saw the movie Brigham Young (1940) at a screening at Brigham Young University. I found the movie to be entertaining and worthwhile as a film, although the historicity is basically a skeleton on which Hollywood drapes their story--which is what Hollywood did all the time anyway. At least it is a positive portrayal.
It may interest readers to know what Heber J. Grant, President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1918 to 1945 had to say about the movie. This is taken from the LDS Conference Report, Sunday October 6, 1940, page 96.
"I am thankful beyond expression for the very wonderful and splendid moving picture that has been made of Brigham Young. I have heard some little criticism of it, but we cannot expect the people who do not know that Brigham Young was in very deed the representative of God upon this earth, who do not know his wonderful character, to tell the story as we would tell it. We know that he was a prophet of the living God and the representative of the Lord here upon the earth. There is nothing in the picture that reflects in any way against our people. It is a very marvelous and wonderful thing, considering how people generally have treated us and what they have thought of us. Of course there are many things in the picture that are not strictly correct, and that is announced in the picture itself. It is of course a picture and we could not hope that they would make a picture at their expense, running into a couple of million dollars, to be just as we would like it. We know that Brigham Young was a powerful and wonderful man, the greatest man of his day, and one of the great things about Brigham Young was that he always gave credit to Joseph Smith for everything that he did. He claimed that he was simply building upon the foundation laid by the prophet of God, who had seen God and conversed with Jesus Christ. He never doubted for one minute the final triumph of the people here in Utah. He was a man of God, and the people thought the world and all of him."
God's Army (2000)
This is what real cinema is about.
Overall, I felt it was a good movie, especially for being the first entry in its field and its limited budget. There were some things that didn't seem appropriate at first, but when seen in the context of the whole movie, make sense. And that's the way it is with the plan of salvation. Not everything makes sense or even seems appropriate, or OK at first, but in the big picture it all works out. Perhaps it would have helped if the actors really knew what their characters portrayed--since only about ten percent of the cast were members of the Church. Some things can't be acted. However, the film was well done and watchable. The story was not just the eye candy which only allows two or three viewings as is the case in many of today's pictures, but a real story with many subtle points which would make it viewable many times. Kudos to Richard Dutcher. This is what real cinema is about.