There’s a scene part-way through Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s Jesus Camp where Levi, one of the children who attends the titular camp, and who is already a burgeoning preacher at the age of 13, claims he can always tell when he’s around non-Christians. There’s something off about them, he says, something that makes him feel sick.

Some might find such a statement to be rather horrifying and judgmental, most likely the result of the sort of parental indoctrination that gives Richard Dawkins the heebie-jeebies. Others might find the young man’s naivete laughable. For myself, it brought on a curious form of nostalgia.

Born into a predominantly Christian family and raised with Christian ideas my entire life, and having attended church schools and regular youth group meetings, I often had very similar things to say about those who existed outside my Christian bubble. That all came crashing down when I began attending public schools. For the first time in my life, I had friends who weren’t Christians. I had friends who held beliefs directly opposed to much of what I had been taught, who believed and practiced paganism and witchcraft, New Age spiritualism, agnosticism, and atheism.

My ministers and teachers had taught me that such people were going to hell in a hand-basket unless I made sure my witness was infallible, I didn’t engage in sinful behavior, and I lived a righteous life. There was one problem with that approach: these hell-bound friends of mine were, in some ways, much better kids than many of my Christian peers.

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A western set in the outback of Australia in the late 19th century, The Proposition is a stark, violent, blood-soaked film that hearkens back to the finest Clint Eastwood westerns.  Guy Pearce—who, with his long straggly hair, stubble, and cigarette, even looks like the Man With No Name—plays Charlie Burns, whose outlaw family has become legendary in the country for their bloodthirsty ways.

When he’s captured by the military along with his younger brother, he’s given a second chance.  He has 9 days to dring back his older brother Arthur, the head of the gang and mastermind of their violence.  If he doesn’t, his younger brother will be hung on Christmas Day.

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One of the downfalls of having so much information concerning upcoming movie releases, especially foreign movie releases, at your fingertips (due to the likes of YouTube) is that it’s entirely possible to see all of the good parts of a movie before you even pop the DVD in your player.  That’s how I felt at first with District B-13 (aka Banlieue 13).  However, to its credit, the movie actually turns out to be a little more than I thought it might be.

Don’t get me wrong—District B-13 is still, first and foremost, a high-octane action movie.  The setting is Paris in the year 2010.  Crime has become so rampant that the government has resorted to walling off entire sections of the city.  The worst of these is B13, which is ruled by a ruthless gangster who has somehow come into posession of a nuclear warhead that he intends to use against the rest of the city.

Enter the two buddies: one is a by-the-books police officer with one helluva roundhouse kick; the other is a former citizen of B13 who has been selected to lead the other through B13 to defuse the bomb.  As you might suspect, the two hit it off right from the start.  Or maybe not.  While the cliches are pretty obvious, as are the movie references—Escape From New York, Lethal Weapon—the movie’s action sequences inject a whole new sort of thrill into the proceedings.

Of course, it helps when one of your leads is a bonafide martial arts expert who has squared off against the likes of Jet Li and the other is one of the inventors of “parkour”, a sort of martial arts/acrobatic regimen for urban environments.

Using very little CGI or wirework, the stunts and fights scenes have an edge and brutality that you just don’t see everyday, and the men scale buildings and fly across rooftops in a manner that makes Superman look clumsy by comparison.

There are a few unbelievable plot and character twists, but for the most part, the film keeps things lean and mean, becoming much greater than the sum of its parts.  And all of the business about ghettos and government indifference feels strikingly relevant given all of the urban unrest that France has experienced in recent years, which adds an interesting layer of subtext to the film.

Some of my fondest childhood memories involved heading over to a family friend’s house, whipping up some homemade pizzas, and watching James Bond movies like Never Say Never Again on their laserdisc player.  That being said, I didn’t have too strong an attachment to the character.

Partly because the recent Bond films have slowly been sinking in quality (I could bring myself to see Die Another Day), partly because so many of the older Bond movies often have to survive only on their camp value (which is sometimes enough, and sometimes not), and partly because other spy franchises have supplanted the James Bond franchise (i.e. the Bourne movies).

So when it came out that Casino Royale would be a franchise reboot, I was pretty excited.  After all, a reboot did wonders for Batman, allowing the character to slough off so much of the baggage of bad films and giving audiences a fresh perspective.  And that’s just what Casino Royale has done for Bond: wonders.  I knew something was up during the opening credits sequence, which lacked the requisite naked female silhouettes, that something was going to be different about this movie.  And I was right.

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It’s safe to say that, in the annals of martial arts cinema, Geochilmaru will never go down as a classic of the genre.  However, in this day and age where even the smallest display of martial arts on the silver screen quickly becomes a CGI and wire-assisted spectacle, there’s something quite refreshing, and even affecting, about the lo-fi approach that Geochilmaru takes.

The basic premise is as old as the genre: a group of eight martial arts devotees have been invited to sqaure off against eachother in a tournament, with the winner taking on a legendary master known only as “Geochilmaru”.  But the film finds some clever ways to update the tried and true plot.  For starters, this is no period piece.  Rather, it’s set in modern day Korea, where cellphones and Internet access abound.  And in this internet-savvy setting, it only makes sense that all of the combants know eachother, and “Geochilmaru”, via Internet discussion forum.

As the eight men and women travel to the duel’s remote locale (in a battered RV, no less), we get small bits of backstory (though character development is certainly not this film’s strong suit).  Though teachers, accountants, bouncers, and hip-hop dancers in “real” life, they’ve all spent their lives practicing judo, kickboxing, kung fu, hapkido, and boxing.  And as they travel to meet Geochilmaru, we get several displays of martial arts prowess, as the characters decide to work out on-line discussions about the efficacy of various martial arts forms, stances, and ideologies face to face.

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Why are we here?  What purpose does our existence serve?  How can we tell if our lives have meaning, if they are worth living?  What is a life that is worth living?  These are questions for which art—be it literature, poetry, painting, or cinema—is uniquely poised to answer.  Other things, such as science and law may purport to hold the answers.  However, their answers will always be unsatisfactory, will always seem like half-truths and theories when compared to the mysteries, conundrums, and paradoxes that are inherent to artistic explorations of those aforementioned questions.

Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru is a fine example of this.  While Kurosawa is best known for his samurai epics and period pieces (Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Ran), Ikiru (lit. “To Live”) is no less a masterpiece.  What’s more, it’s one that feels vaguely biblical at that, as it takes on topics and expounds upon themes that could have easily come from that most existential of books: Ecclesiastes.

Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura, best known for his role as Seven Samurai‘s elderly samurai leader) is about as sad a sack as one can imagine.  He’s spent nearly 30 years of his life working in the city offices, but even after such tenure, he’s still little more than a faceless cog in post-WWII Japan’s bureaucratic machine.  He spends his days stamping documents, oblivious to the machinations of his underlings, who constantly wonder when the old man is going to die so they can move up the totem pole.

It’s a predictable existence, but also a safe one.  That is, until Watanabe discovers that he has stomach cancer.  The viewer learns this fact at the very beginning of the movie, when an emotionless narrator informs us of his imminent demise, which only makes us feel even more pity for the man.

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Several years ago, Zhang Ziyi (who had become Hollywood’s new “it girl” thanks to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) was in talks to star in a movie with—wait for it—Adam Sandler. Entitled Good Cook, Likes Music, the film (which is apparently languishing in one of the lower circles of Development Hell) features Sandler as a loveable slacker (whoa, big surprise there) who sends away for a Chinese mail-order bride (Zhang). Presumably, sparks and cross-cultural misunderstandings would fly, both would learn some valuable life lessons, and true love would win out in the end.

Looked at it from that way, the plot of the 2005 Danish film Chinaman isn’t all that dissimilar. But it’s safe to say that’s where the similarities end.

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When Jet Li announced that Fearless was going to be his final martial arts film, folks and fanboys were understandably concerned.  After all, this is Jet Li we’re talking about, arguably one of the finest onscreen martial artists of all time, a man for whom there really is no replacement.

However, Li certainly has his reasons.  In various interviews and statements, Li, who has been making martial arts movies since the age of 16, has confessed that he feels he has done as much as he can with martial arts, and wishes to branch out into other genres.  Furthermore, he’s become increasingly tired with the way martial arts are often portrayed onscreen, with all of the focus placed on the violence and mayhem, rather than the arts’ philosophical and spiritual aspects.  And then there’s the simple fact that, at the age of 43, Li is getting to the point where age is a concern, even for a gold medalist and world champion.

And so Fearless is his last pure martial arts movie, his final statement on the topic.  And if you wanted to make a final statement on martial arts, there would be poorer choices than a film (loosely) based on the life of Huo Yuanjia, a martial artist who rose to prominence defending China’s honor in the early 20th century.

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