Interview: Fraser Heston of ‘Charlton Heston Presents The Bible’

Posted on March 29, 2011 at 3:17 pm

Fraser Heston was kind enough to take time to talk with me about the re-release of some of his father’s greatest films. Fraser, who played the baby Moses in The Ten Commandments, directed his father in Charlton Heston Presents the Bible. Both have been restored and are being re-released this week.

How did the Bible project come about?

That came out of a conversation between my dad and me many years ago, in the early 90’s. We were sitting around talking about what his next project should be. Dad said, “I’ve always wanted to record the Bible again.” He had done a wonderful recording for Vanguard records back in the 50’s. I said, “If we’re going to record the Bible, it has to be on film. We’re not going to do it behind a curtain. And we have to go to the holy land. We have to film in something like a Roman amphitheater. And we’re going to need some great Biblical art. Let’s illustrate these stories — we can’t just have my dad talking all the time. We found these marvelous paintings throughout the whole history of Biblical art. We decided to make a broader, much more open-ended and he ended up doing the commentaries between chapters. We didn’t do the whole Bible. We did his favorite stories, edited down. And then he comments and talks about it as a story-teller or an actor, not as a priest or a scholar, to share these stories and the beautiful art that goes with them, for people of all faiths.

The King James translation?

He loved the King James translation. It’s beautiful language and still very accessible. I think it’s the most powerful translation and he did as well. We talk about it, how it came to be written, how there are foibles and mistranslations and how it’s all part of the warp and weft of the fabric of the Bible.

How did you find the images?

You have to hire a whole department who researches these things and get the rights and get a filmable image – nowadays we do that all with a computer. The aggregate of all of these images together from Salvador Dali to the classics from the Sistine ceiling and the Michelangelo Moses, all of them together have such an impact.

What else is being restored and re-released?

“Ben Hur” and “The Ten Commandments.” And we’re also re-releasing some of our classic films through Warner Brothers like “Anthony and Cleopatra,” and “Mother Lode,” directed by my father and co-starring Kim Basinger,” and “Treasure Island,” with a young man you may have heard of: Christian Bale.

How long did it take?

It was as long as a feature. We were in the holy land for about three months. And of course in Jerusalem there’s a checkerboard of different faiths and they all have different Sabbaths and holidays. The Moslems have Friday, the Jews have Saturday, and the Christians have Sunday. And different sects have control the access to this monastery or that little place, and so on. One day I was filming in what they call the Hall of the Last Supper and went down to get a cup of coffee and found myself in the tomb of King David. I thought, “Oh, my gosh, this is amazing. I’ve just walked out of one chapter of the Bible and into another, transcended thousands of years of history.” It was pretty darn cool.

Do you have a favorite Bible story?

I love the New Testament but I am very, very partial to the story of Moses. The story of the exodus is the story of freedom. And how poignant today that people on the same ground, walking on the same sand, are fighting for their freedom in Egypt and North Africa. The irony couldn’t be stronger, could it? The words of Moses are inscribed on the Liberty Bell: “Go forward and proclaim liberty throughout the land.” That became a watchword for Dad. Everything he did had to do with freedom.

What stories did you hear about your portrayal of baby Moses in “The Ten Commandments?”

The very first telegram my mother got when I was born was from C.B. DeMille . He said, “Congratulations, he’s got the part!” And then they put me in the basket and the darn thing sank! My dad had to go out there and rescue me. I’ll never forgive them for that.

Did your father have a favorite Bible passage?

He loved the death of Moses, where he passes on his mantle to Joshua. He had it by heart and never forgot it, even when he had Alzheimer’s. It’s just a moving passage. “I shall not cross over.” It’s very moving and there are so many moving scenes in that story and in that film that just kind of ring true. So many small, human moments. Moses was not divine, though that was not always clear in the DeMille version. He questioned his worthiness, and that just makes you care about the guy. He has loves and hates and he has a temper. He becomes a very human character in a giant story. It’s a mistake to hold the Bible up as a remote, sheltered experience. It needs to be vibrant and contemporary. And “Man for All Seasons,” a whole Charlton Heston collection. He was an actor’s director. He was artistic; he looked at the scene from an artist’s point of view, a story-teller, not to call attention to himself as a director but just tell a story the best way he can. He learned that from William Wyler and C.B. DeMille. “Ben Hur” and “Ten Commandments” are not about the effects or the crowds or the action; it’s about the people. Many times the camera doesn’t move at all. Shots like that are what you remember from those films. We are so fortunate that a major part of our cultural heritage is being restore with such care by Warner’s made made available to a new generation.

I have one copy each of “Charlton Heston Presents the Bible” on DVD and “The Ten Comandments” on DVD and Blu-Ray to give away. To enter, send an email to moviemom@moviemom.com with the DVD or Blu-Ray you want in the subject line. Be sure to include your address. I will select a winner at random on April 2. Good luck! (My policy on accepting prizes to give away is posted on the site.)

Fair Game

Posted on March 28, 2011 at 3:29 pm

It turns out that being a spy is not glamorous at all, especially when you are the mother of twins. Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) does not get to pick up a bunch of fun gadgets from Q or change from a wetsuit into a ball gown to crash a party at the palatial home of the bad guy. What she does do is a lot of tough, gritty research and a lot of painstaking relationship building with people who have every reason not to trust her. And sometimes she also had to threaten people who were pretty scary. And then come home and make dinner for her husband and children.

Her job at the CIA requires judgment, skill, courage, intelligence (in both senses of the word), loyalty, integrity, and the ability to keep a lot of secrets. While she had all of that, the people around her did not, and she found herself outed as a spy in the press, not for anything she did but because the government wanted to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson (Sean Penn). Suddenly she was out of a job but still not permitted to speak publicly, even to respond to the false and disparaging statements being made about her.

The problem was not that the White House made a mistake in thinking — and saying in the State of the Union address — that there was evidence that Iraq was making an effort to buy uranium from Africa to make nuclear weapons. The problem was that the White House made a mistake about how to respond when they were publicly contradicted. Former Ambassador Joe Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times saying that he had been sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate this rumor and found no evidence of any such transaction, explaining the basis for his conclusion. Instead of responding on the substance, pointing to a better source of information, or accepting his conclusion and providing additional justification for concerns about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the White House decided to discredit Joe Wilson, which involved telling the press that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a spy.

Director Doug Liman (who was his own cinematographer here) can make a scene with two people across a desk as gripping as the action scenes in he gave us in “The Bourne Identity” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” Based on the books by Plame and Wilson and on court transcripts and other records made available since the trial, he has given us their side of the story, with the leak of Plame’s role a weapon of mass destruction aimed at their reputations and their family. Because it is from their point of view, they are in almost every scene. That means we never see who is plotting against them or what the plot is; we just know that the most powerful men the world has ever known see them as “fair game,” or, even worse, as collateral damage. Liman, whose father was counsel in the Iran-Contra investigation, understands the culture of Washington well, the wonky dinner party debates, the show-boating, the passion, the long hours, the patriotism and the partisanship, the ends/means balancing act, and the way that sometimes everything boils down to a kind of middle school clique-ish brattiness.

Watts and Penn are outstanding, very compelling in the scenes about national security and even more so as what is going on affects their marriage. Penn lets us see that Wilson can be a bit of a blowhard and Watts lets us see that Plame knows that, can be frustrated by it, but loves him because she understands that it is a part of his passionate engagement with policy. Watts makes Plame a serious professional who achieves her objectives with preparation and diligence, though her being an exceptionally attractive woman made it easier to diminish and marginalize her, and she contributed to that by posing for Vanity Fair. The best surprise of the film is David Andrews as Scooter Libby, a wonderfully layered performance that shows us his mistrust of the career staff and his insecurity about the way they saw him. At the end of the day, you don’t need a Dr. Evil to be the bad guy. You just need a bully who thinks he can get away with it.

Tangled

Posted on March 28, 2011 at 3:24 pm

Disney has taken a 200-year-old story from the Brothers Grimm and made it just modern enough, sassy without being snarky, fresh and contemporary without any po-mo air quotes. It’s the classic fairy tale of the girl with the long, long hair who is locked in the tower by an evil witch.

A potion made from a special flower that could heal all injuries and bestow eternal youth given to the queen while she was in childbirth somehow transmuted it special powers to the baby’s hair. Mother Gothel (deliciously dastardly diva Donna Murphy) kidnaps Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) from the castle so that she can be young forever. She raises the baby as her own daughter, telling her that she must never leave the tower because the world is a very dangerous place for a vulnerable young woman with an extraordinary gift.

Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi of television’s “Chuck”) is a dashing adventurer and a thief. There are wanted posters with (somewhat inaccurate) drawings of his face. On the run from the palace guards, he comes across the tower and thinks it looks like a great place to hide out. Rapunzel has been kept away from the world, but the world finally comes to her.

She persuades her “mother” to go on a trip and forces Flynn to agree to take her out for one day. Every year, on her birthday, she sees mysterious floating lights. She wants, just once, to leave the tower to find out what they are.

They stop in a pub filled with scary villains and in a musical number reminiscent of “High School Musical’s” “Stick to the Status Quo,” the thugs launch into an hilarious song about their dreams that is one of the movie’s best moments. But Flynn’s hulking former cronies, the palace guards and their super-tracker horse, and Mother Gothel are all after them, so Rapunzel’s hair will need to be part slingshot, part bungee cord, part Tarzan’s swinging vine, and part flashlight to keep them on the way to the lanterns. Even though they are often in danger, Rapunzel learns that the world is not as terrifying as she was told. And Flynn learns that the world is not as bleak as his experience had taught him.

There are adventures and exchanges of confidences, and more encounters with the thieves, the guards, the horse (one of the movie’s wittiest additions to the story), and the witch on the way to an exquisitely beautiful release of the lanterns, one of the loveliest moments on screen all year and well worth the 3D glasses. Tuneful numbers from Alan Menken (“Aladdin,” “Beauty and the Beast”) with witty lyrics from Glenn Slater sound more like show tunes than boomer-friendly pop, especially when delivered by Broadway star Murphy. The classic gloss they give the story nicely frames more modern touches like the computer-enhanced animation and spunky heroine. Disney has given us another princess worthy of its canon.

Sucker Punch

Posted on March 24, 2011 at 10:13 pm

Girls in thigh-hi stockings and tiny spangled miniskirts take on steam-powered corpses, WWI bi-planes, samurai robots, and an angry dragon, along with a series of odiously predatory men in the latest film from Zack Snyder. His versions of “300” and “Watchmen” overwhelmed the storylines with striking, provocative visuals. Here, he solves that problem by pretty much not having any storyline at all. He literally and metaphorically cuts to the chase. It’s not so much punch, a bit more sucker.

Baby Doll is a young girl in blond pigtails, framed for her sister’s murder and thrown into a nightmarish mental hospital by her abusive step-father. Emily Browning plays her with just two facial expressions, which I came to think of as “Mom said I can’t go to the mall until I finish my math homework” and “I really want to go to the mall.” The step-father pays a corrupt orderly (Oscar Isaac, in the film’s best performance) to have Baby Doll lobotomized so that she cannot tell anyone what he has done, and that he tried to molest her after her mother died. She enters a dingy lounge area called “the theater,” where a sympathetic therapist (Carla Gugino, sounding like Natasha from “Rocky and Bullwinkle”) is encouraging the patients (all young and very hot women) to re-enact their stories.

The rest of the movie is best summarized by the song memorably performed by En Vogue: “Free your mind and the rest will follow.” Baby Doll then either sees or imagines the hospital as a brothel, run by the evil Blue (Isaac again, in sharkskin suit and gigolo-style mustache), where the girls are forced to dance for the customers. Baby Doll has the ability to mesmerize men with her dances, which somehow turn into deliriously deranged gamer-style battle sequences as she and the other girls must, in classic computer game tradition, obtain a map, fire, a knife, a key, and make some unknown sacrifice to achieve freedom.

They could have had fun with this, but instead everyone acts as though it is deadly serious, and so it just drags. The other girls, played by Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, and Jamie Chung, are supposed to be tough but vulnerable, but they look absurd, racing around on heels in skimpy costumes as they fight with swords and guns, as though they believe they are exemplifying female empowerment and solidarity instead of parodying it. It is sad to see these talented actresses feel that they have no other opportunity for career advancement than to appear in this dispiriting dreck. A movie about finding freedom from that prison would be something worth seeing.

(more…)

Jane Eyre

Posted on March 24, 2011 at 10:03 pm

Why do film-makers keep coming back to Jane Eyre? Charlotte Bronte’s story has elements of horror, mystery, revenge, romance, and morality, but it is an internal narrative, Jane’s own clear-eyed but personal view of her story (“Reader, I married him.”) And yet, it is such a perennial favorite that this is at least the ninth (at least and so far) English-language cinematic visit to the wild moors and the wilder hearts of Jane Eyre. And that is not counting the many, many variations and spin-offs, including a book and movie that tell the same story from the perspective of another character.

Jane Eyre is an orphan, raised under the cruelest circumstances by her aunt (Sally Hawkins). Her spirit and integrity are such an affront to the aunt that she is sent away to a charity school called Lowood, where the girls are treated with contempt. She makes one true, loving friend, a girl named Helen, who ties of consumption in Jane’s arms. When she finishes at Lowood, Jane (Mia Wasikowska of “The Kids are All Right” and “In Treatment” in a performance that beautifully conveys both Jane’s emotional vulnerability and her strength of character) takes a job as a governess at a home called Thornfield. She is warmly welcomed by the housekeeper, Mrs. Fairfax (Dame Judi Dench) and her charge, a little French girl, but it is some time before she meets her new employer, Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender, in a less broody, more desperately unhappy performance). When she first sees him, she is walking in the woods and his horse rears up and throws him. She must help him to the house and they walk slowly, him leaning on her heavily. The emotional upheaval and unexpected intimacy of this encounter are followed by mysterious disturbances in the house, by an anguished longing, an almost unimaginable romantic ecstasy, and then by betrayal, loss, a new start, unexpected independence, and then acknowledgment of a connection too strong to resist.

And it is that relationship, all smolder and repressed passion, that answers the question. The Eyre/Rochester romance has inspired happy sighs for 160 years and in these days, when so little is repressed that no one makes time for smolder, it still delivers.

Director Cary Fukunaga (“Sin Nombre”) wisely used natural light and no make-up to give this version a rough, natural, intimate feel. Jane’s hair is a smooth loop over each ear with an intricate knot in the back, showing capability and determination. And perhaps some imagination as well. The way that the setting and events seem to embody the emotion the main characters cannot express, which is what makes an internally narrated story so compellingly cinematic.

(more…)