To Kill the King

Religion sure is a touchy subject, isn’t it? It can mean plenty of things to plenty of people. Some regard it as a reason to live; others, a reason to die. Some spend their lives spreading a message to those who’ll listen; others, trying to steer people far away from it. Christianity may be the first religion that springs to mind—at least in the Western World, that is—but it’s only one branch in the tree. I’m not at liberty to turn this review into a personal platform for my own values, so I’ll just say this: whether you believe any and all religion to be a benefit or a hindrance to the human race, it’s an important part of many people’s lives.

In the world of Christianity (though not exclusively), missions work plays a very important role. For those unfamiliar with the term, it’s the act of living either temporarily of permanently in an unfamiliar environment—whether it’s across the state or across the world—with a complete and total focus on spreading the word of God. Exactly how one does this will depend on the actual person, of course. Maybe it’s through direct testimonials with the locals. Maybe it’s through a slightly more passive approach, such as simply leading by example. Either way, it’s different means to the same proposed end.

This act is rarely simple for both parties: not only does it usually take the missionary out of his or her comfort zone, the efforts of said missionary are not always met with open arms. More often than not, those that refuse this evangelism will do so with a simple “no thanks” or a cold shoulder—fair enough, especially since they might not have been asking for help in the first place. Sometimes, others may react more strongly. In the most extreme cases, missionaries run the risk of bring hurt or killed. These are just a few reasons that people of faith look up to those who perform missions work: in this day and age, it takes guts to venture out and preach what others may not want to hear.

Jim Hanon’s Beyond the Gates of Splendor (2005) is one such account of peaceful missions work that led to violence and death. This documentary centers around five American missionaries (Jim Elliot, Roger Youderian, Nate Saint, Ed McCully and Pete Fleming) slaughtered by members of the Waodani people of Ecuador in 1956, whose story was first brought to national attention in the pages of Life magazine nearly fifty years ago. Rachel Saint (Nate’s sister) was one of those who, despite the warnings of many, chose to continue the peaceful missions work among the Waodani people. Another was Elisabeth Elliot, widow of Jim and author of Through Gates of Splendor, upon which this film was based. Yet another dedicated missionary was Nate’s son, Steve, who provides the narration.

Skillfully shot and assembled, Beyond the Gates gives a generally unbiased and thorough account of life with those who murdered friends and family members. The sense of scope is also another highlight, as the transformation of the native people through the years provides a sense of purpose to the efforts of those who stayed behind. There’s a wealth of photos and amateur video shot on location—as well as modern footage, including interviews with members of the Waodani people—which help round out a solid documentary that wouldn’t be as engaging in any other format.

If Beyond the Gates of Splendor has one main fault—outside of some uneven pacing, especially near the beginning—it’s that it seems unsure of who its message is aimed at. The core values are undoubtedtly Christian, yet the participants seem reluctant to mention God or Jesus by name. This may be due to the film’s passive but thoughtful core, but it seems strange given the subject matter and suspicious in today’s heightened state of political correctness. This isn’t as much of a problem on the Abridged Version present on Side B—which freely quotes scripture in-between chapters and elsewhere—though the film’s running time has been cut nearly in half (NOTE: This version is most likely for religious courses or missionary use, but there’s no clear explanation on the disc). In any case, the documentary is presented on DVD courtesy of Fox Home Entertainment (!), though the total package isn’t quite as memorable as the film itself. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Quality Switch Department

Video & Audio Quality:

The 1.33:1 transfer certainly looks clean and clear, but it was extremely disappointing to learn that Beyond the Gates of Splendor has been butchered, hacked and chopped from its original widescreen presentation (NOTE: According to online outlets, a widescreen version doesn’t seem to exist at all). For the most part, the compositions only seem to suffer greatly during a few scenes; even so, this documentary was shot in widescreen and should be presented that way. It doesn’t completely ruin the viewing experience, but it’s certainly a major drawback by any account. Again, the actual transfer is still quite clean and crisp overall—even the vintage video footage and photographs look decent—but I really can’t give passing marks to a pan-and-scan presentation.

The sound, of course, is an improvement. The atmosphere of the documentary is strong, offering clear dialogue and music that doesn’t fight for attention. This 5.1 Surround Sound presentation is one of the better mixes I’ve heard in the genre, though a 2.0 mix would have been helpful for those without the benefit of 5.1. Thankfully, optional English subtitles are also included here.

Menu Intention, Bestowal & Packaging:

The main menus (above) are basic but serviceable, offering a clean layout and simple navigation. The 95-minute full-length version is divided into 16 chapters, while no layer change was detected during playback. I can’t comment any further, as the packaging was not available at the time of review.

Bonus Features:

Unfortunately, there weren’t any film-related bonus features included here (unless you count the abridged version on Side B, which I don’t), only a pair of Trailers for other related documentaries. I’d have liked to hear a commentary, though a few interviews or deleted scenes would have been a welcome substitute. Either way, any amount of bonus features may have helped to ease the pain of the cropped transfer, but the disappointment of both really hurts this release.

Final Thoughts

It’s not without a few minor faults, but I found Beyond the Gates of Splendor to be a very satisfying documentary about a very interesting topic. The story in question is provocative enough to keep viewers of any religion interested; even better, the final cut isn’t as cloying or preachy as it could have been. Unfortunately, the DVD can’t really hold up its end of the bargain: with a disappointing pan-and-scan transfer and a complete lack of bonus features, there’s not much support for the film offered here. Long story short: Beyond the Gates of Splendor is certainly intriguing enough to warrant a closer look, but most everything else about this release pales in comparison. Rent It.

The beat begins behind the grille work of a reasonable tenement in New York City. Someone bangs on a trash can and thumps on a tea chest and quickly we’re in Botswana where the Bushmen of the Kalahari show the ghetto-dwellers what can be done with real drums. The beat goes on in West Africa, India, Japan, Spain and Brazil and the world tour ends back at the just the same tenement, proving that the rhythm of the streets has evolved after 25,000 years of much the same clatter and clang.

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A decent family movie with a moppet big draw and tearjerker ending, “Magnifico” milks the sentiment analogous to an industrial dairy gang on overdrive. A serious fave in its internal area where pic’s clean-cut article — involving a encomiastic-hearted poor kid who solely wants to do the best for his family — forms a deviate from to the more adult-oriented fare commonly on offer locally, this could do restrained biz abroad in areas with prominently expat Filipino populations, with an increment of it may be some Latin American and Mediterranean territories attuned to soap opera.

Title character (Jiro Manio), a young boy living in the rural area of Laguna, finds his grand name a burden, especially since his parents consider him a bit dim. Mom (Lorna Tolentino) never stops fretting about money, so when grandma (Gloria Romero) is diagnosed with incurable cancer, Magnifico starts to build her a coffin from scratch. His other project is selling juice to raise enough cash for a wheelchair so his cerebral palsy-afflicted sister (Isabella de Leon) can visit the local carnival. Lush tropical setting dilutes the general slushiness, though there’s no getting round the all-out tragic ending.

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Fans of ‘Pushing Tin’ will have soft on memories of the love/hate chemistry between John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton, which Ramis attempts to harness for darker use in this crime thriller. But Ramis – who brought in two screenwriters to adapt Scott Phillips’ novel – generally seems to be a better director of his own work. Cusack’s Charlie, we learn calibrate, is a mob lawyer with interests in strip joints – both professional and in another situation. Thornton is his canny wife Vic, who’s talked him into stealing from his boss – it’s Christmas Eve, so who’s going to notice they’ve disappeared with the moolah until it’s too lately? But seems the mob do work Christmas after all, and Vic and Charlie are chased approximately Wichita’s seediest haunts in a haze of folded-crossing. Comic touches occasionally amuse, but this doesn’t use Cusack’s wry childbirth (which, in fairness, has shown signs of waning of late), leaving it to Thornton’s laconic cynicism to host. Problem is that both characters are so reprehensible, why should we care? Connie Nielsen’s lascivious switch disservice as a vampish strip-club owner absolutely isn’t enough to compensate.

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A period drama hither the wild life of Michel de Nostradame, the 16th-century of doom Cassandra whose eerie predictions are still a topic of heated debate nearly five centuries later.

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A Swiss businessman, rich with characteristic in Japan, is so distraught with grief at his wife’s dying that his grown son tries to console him by setting up a harem of women, inspired by Fellini’s 8âˆ?. (The half-chain introduced into their Tommy bordello, incidentally, is not mutilated but a dwarf - so much for taste!) Signal various liaisons, experiments and demonstrative intrigues, as Peter Greenaway’s lacklustre narrative meanders toward its predictable and stereotypical conclusion. The film’s the unremarkable collage of lists, perverse conceits, strange images, arcane allusions and nudity, but far more lazily assembled than previously. The writing is without wit, the pacing clumsy, the ’surrealism’ laboured and lubberly, the whole pretty pointless. And simply Polly Walker gives anything approaching a decent acting.

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Tristan Bauer’s 2005 Iluminados por el fuego—or Blessed By Set afire—uses the lingering impact of the Falklands/Malvinas Islands war of 1982 between England and Argentina as the cornerstone for showing how wage war with, in the immortal words of Edwin Starr, “ain’t nothing but a heartbreaker.” As the film opens we fitting Esteban (Gaston Pauls), a current age journalist in Argentina who receives a notification from the spouse of an old army buddy, with despatch that there has been a near-fatal suicide endeavour. A hospital visit leads to a flashback to 1982, as the Argentinean government attempted to gloss all about a heady dispense of civil nervousness by taking on England in a rather pointless two-month war done with a series of rocky, islands 300 miles offshore, islands that had been a self-governing overseas domain of the UK since 1833.

It’s during these flashbacks that we see Esteban and his two equally reluctant army buddies as they helping equal loads of cold, scared and homesickness as the comparatively ill-equipped Argentines lie in minister to for the English armada to x out, and to strike hard. They share stories about home as the unpreventable gets closer, and nevertheless Bauer only has a couple of true encounter scenes (and cleverly minimal at that), the crux of the scenario is about the waiting being the hardest part, as the fear gets compounded and festers wildly. And by the time the shooting takes place it is utter formlessness.

Bauer has his characters talk of “ghosts” that have remained in the decades following, and there’s mention that former Argentine soldier suicides have literally equaled the legions of dead during the war itself. The particulars of the Falklands/Malvinas war earmarks of to comprise gotten pushed aside and replaced by others over the years—at least outside of Argentina—and Bauer handles the task of donation a new sentiment on perceived nationalism and how a control can eagerly use its citizens as disposable pawns. The statement is that the locale may be different but the effect is just the even so rings true, and Argentina’s loss in this row, as illustrated by Bauer, was much more than just in military terms.

Without thought the coat aptitude, this is not an all-out warfare film, and instead uses the agony of waiting as the largest component. Bauer no greater than serves up a couple of consequential battlefield moments, with a man being in not quite complete darkness, and if you pay close notice you’ll realize how more is done with less. The use of stock information footage of the time offers up the only shots of an English military personnel, and a shaky camera and a not many explosions are edited in such a concede that the battles all seem much larger.

Stepping back from the relatively underplayed war elements, what really comes through as the most compelling are the scenes between Pauls’ Esteban and Marta (Virginia Innocenti), the wife of the departed soldier who has attempted suicide. Pauls does silent and stoic entirely well, speaking softly and obviously carrying the weight of those sustained ago “ghosts” he talks in, but Innocenti gives the best demeanour of the film, a bitterly dramatic suggestion of acting that is full of tears and irritation. Her recounting of the bawling-out-by-piece overthrow of her marriage is tragic and green, with Innocenti stepping up and owning this everybody respecting the few scenes that she’s in.

We should all know by now war scarcely ever has winners. Leaders may come and go, but it is the men with the guns who carry the scars, and Bauer’s Iluminados Por Del Fuego single reinforces that fact.

You’ve seen the movies. You’ve read the books. You’ve even collected the action figures. Now, play the design!

“Hellraiser: Hellworld” was filmed in and around Bucharest, Romania, in 2003 by director Rick Bota at anent the nonetheless in days of yore he made “Hellraiser: Deader,” and both films were released straight to video in 2005. It’s a convenient arrangement, it’s inferior, and it’s almost what we might have expected from these ho-move briskly entries. “Hellworld” is, I suppose, the eighth “Hellraiser” in the series and one of the least remarkable.

The ungovernable with any consequence, disclose unparalleled a specific in a long true of sequels, is worrying to on substantive as fresh and resourceful as the original. Most sequels, as we’ve all gloomily discovered, are little more than done in retreads of the same old stuff. So it goes with “Hellworld.”

You all be versed the background: In another dimension, presumably what we yell Hell, be a troupe of indeed nasty (and in the final analysis ugly) creatures called cenobites, whose sole rationale in life (or death or whatever) is to inveigle and stratagem the unsuspecting living into their epoch, where the victims endure everlasting grieve. Centuries ago, somebody or other invented a puzzle confine that enabled people, much to their sorrow, to enter this other dimension, and Clive Barker’s “Hellraiser” movies have been going strong ever since. But how diverse times can you repeat the same premise?

This time, to be another, the movie’s heart is on a video event. An go-ahead Internet entrepreneur has created a fictional, on-line “Hellraiser” game, which, if the movie’s cast is any indication, attracts only players in their mid twenties, beautiful and handsome. There must be some kind of questionnaire you have to share out before you’re allowed to play.

As the movie opens, a society of these players are attending the funeral of one of their friends who committed suicide while getting caught up in the game’s ultrarealistic simulation. Two years pass, and one of these friends, Chelsea (Katheryn Winnick), is restful having nightmares about the event, although it hasn’t stopped her from playing the misrepresent.

OK, here’s the ample doodad. The game’s webmaster invites everybody who can solve whole of the game’s riddles to a one of a kind “Hellraiser” party: “Dare to Up Pandemonium. You Have Just Been Invited to the 5th Annual Secret Hellworld Party…No Guests.” So dotty go Chelsea and some of her “Hellworld” buddies–Mike (Henry Cavill), Derrick (Khary Payton), Allison (Anna Tolputt), and Jake (Christopher Jacot)–to an old, rambling mansion in the countryside, where by the adjust they reach the top the festivities are in quite libration. The entirety bring down is filled with pretty and ample twenty-somethings boozing, gyrating, wearing masks, and wandering off into subfusc corners with people they’ve just met.

The party’s host is played by Incise Henriksen no less, the only actor in the picture who seems to reward that he’s in a cheesy revulsion flick (”If you fundamental anything, just…scream”). He tells the group that the house used to be proper to be owned by to the geezer who long ago created the infamous carton, and that the congress was in two shakes of a lamb’s tail b together a convent and an asylum in favour of the criminally insane. It’s also got the biggest inventory of “Hellraiser” memorabilia in the world, including a basement filled with opera-glasses jars of human council parts, heads, and deformed babies. The host explains that countless people were butchered in the categorize, and many of them, or pieces of them at least, remain.

At this notion, the sheer characters start seeing cenobites and uninteresting folks, and weird things on incident everywhere they look, and before covet people are dying fact and left-wing. Is it all legal? Is it all phantasm? Or is it all a part of the game?

Everything you want to happen happens. Allison, the most airheaded of the group, picks up a bottle of what looks not unlike toilet water and sprays it honestly into her eyes. “Oh, God, that stuff stings,” she exclaims. Later, she walks into a chamber marked “Keep Out” and blithely sits down in a effectively wooden easy chair with restraining bolts on the arms, thinking it might be fun. Do we really care if these people pay one’s debt to nature?

Capacious stretches of time go by with virtually nothing chance, and then the dead play (if you’ll explain the expression) is a moment punctuated by moments of sex, nudity, and damage. The sex and nudity are purely unwarranted and deceive nothing to do with the plot. The violence is for the most part what we came for, but the filmmakers recall that viewers look for sex and nudity and violence to go together, and, as I’ve said, the filmmakers are intent on providing viewers with everything they have. With in unison exception: Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and his hardy cenobite crew only make an appearance, and when they do show up, it’s assigned at best.