"Have you news of my boy Jack? Not this tide."
— Rudyard Kipling, My Boy JackIn 1914 England, patriotism is high in the early days of WWI, and writer Rudyard Kipling (David Haig, Four Weddings and a Funeral) is one of its most eloquent and passionate voices. John "Jack," (Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Potter films), Kipling's only son, is underage, hopelessly myopic, and eager to join the war effort. Kipling's outspoken American wife Carrie (Kim Cattrall, Sex and the City) remains more sanguine on the course of the war, and the fate of her family. My Boy Jack, based on a true story, tells of a nation at war, and offers an intimate portrait of one family's complex and divided experience in it.
via www.pbs.org
Tomorrow we will conclude our investigation into Die Hard as Christmas movie. And although my initial list of reviews will be severely truncated I think this limited progression will work well.
Twelfth night will will hopefully bring a brief exploration of Joyeux Noel (2005) and the apocalyptic nature of Christmastide, and Epiphany will culminate with the adoration of the Christ child in Children of Men (2006). With that said, I should note an absolutely beautiful movie that aired last night on PBS, My Boy Jack.
It is a movie of value. It is a movie with substance. Well directed, despite the fact that the original material was a stage play. It doesn't try to pretend to be a play. When it can, it uses the language of cinema to tell its story. Wonderful performances by Daivd Haig, Kim Catrall (yes), Carey Mulligan, and Daniel Radcliffe as the idealistic adventure seeking son of Rudyard Kipling.
Ginia Bellafante's review at the New York Times is an absolutely abysmal display of myopic post-critical trash. Don't buy into it.
It is difficult for us to comprehend the the apocalyptic horrors World War 1 unleashed on Western civilization. The best and brightest minds of the European continent were decimated in the meat-grinder of the Somme. We still live in its shadow. World War 1 signaled the end of classical Liberalism. World War 2 signaled the end of humanism.
Ours is a world where dead bodies, murder and sex are shown on television (commercials) at noon on a Sunday afternoon, and the cinematic industrial complex thinks that the concerns and pain of a family struggling with sending a son to the gates of hell belong on a small budgeted television production. Despite this madness, My Boy Jack is an honest and artful taste of the dregs of personal and social human existence. It forces us to face up to the apocalyptic element of existential life, even if it happens to be the privileged family of Rudyard Kipling.
You may not get the roller coaster rush, or the sexual twinge, or the feeling of post-colonial righteous indignation, but you will be a better human being for examining these human struggles ...
also read: Meditations on Apocalyptic Romanticism Part 1 and Meditaions on Apocalyptic Romanticism Part 2
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