Pardon me if I become a bit of a shill for a moment. In my home of Memphis, Tennessee, a local Christian optometrist named David Evans decided to make a film with his own money, in an effort to help his own church. The movie he made was The Grace Card, which is now available on DVD this week. The movie was picked up by Affirm Films, the people responsible for helping make Fireproof a hit. At my former job, I had the opportunity to help out with this movie, and it was a great experience.
The movie is about a Memphis police officer named Mac (Michael Joiner) who loses his son in a tragic car accident, leaving him an angry, bitter shell of a human being. His suffering infects his wife and remaining son, Blake (Rob Erickson), who has begun acting out as a result. Years after the fact, his sour attitude and anger issues prevent him from moving up at work, resulting in only more frustration and rage. He gets paired up with a new partner named Sam (Michael Higgenbottom), a black preacher who has also taken the vocation of a police officer since being a man of God doesn’t pay the bills, which causes him to question the role God has planned for him. Sam tries to get at the heart of Mac’s anger during their outings at work together, which naturally causes tension to flare up, before tragedy strikes and forces Mac to confront his demons, while Sam selflessly he can for his suffering partner. The Grace Card has some of the cheesy moments you can expect from overtly faith-based films, but it’s an incredibly positive moviegoing experience that didn’t get as much buzz as films like Fireproof and Soul Surfer did.
One of the movie’s key themes is putting aside a past of racial differences in order to work towards a more positive future. The theme of race being paired with the buddy cop movie is an old hat, but it’s never been done quite like it has here. A cynical reading of the movie could point out that this is a story being spun by a white filmmaker and a white writer, however this does not mean that there is not truth contained within the film’s message. The Grace Card isn’t sugarcoating racially explosive times like the Civil Rights era or the Civil War the way movies often do (though it does recall the days of slavery in one scene with Lou Gossett Jr., the most recognizable actor in the film), it takes place in modern day where racism is far less explicit. The movie seems to understand this in a way that socially anachronistic garbage like Crash fails to, and Memphis is a city with a far more explosive racial history than Los Angeles, despite what hacks like Paul Haggis will have you believe.
Check this one out if faith-based films interest you, if that’s the case, then there’s nothing else this week I could possibly hand a bigger recommendation to. Movies that fit within the pedigree of The Grace Card have gotten a great deal of publicity on conservative online publications like this one, I can’t quite figure out why this one hasn’t.
Available on DVD
It’s pretty much a given that we all love The Big Lebowski. I know there are haters out there (I can smell you, skulking around out there on the internet), but for the most part its attracted more of a fanatical cult than any other film in the colorful careers of Joel and Ethan Coen. Many of us have seen the movie more times than we can count, we can quote it endlessly, and we keep the ingredients for a white Russian handy for whenever we feel like throwing it on.
What’s so fun about The Big Lebowski doesn’t just lie in its hilarious dialogue or colorful characters, but in the fact that it’s a classic film-noir plot as observed through a funhouse mirror in a haze of exhaled marijuana smoke. The plot is essentially the same story as Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep, but instead of Bogey playing Phillip Marlowe, we get Jeff Bridges as Jeffrey ‘The Dude” Lebowski, an accidental non-detective who also happens the laziest stoner in Los Angeles, which as the narrator accurately notes, makes him high in the running for laziest worldwide.
The Big Sleep is a film noted for its complex plot, and The Big Lebowski‘s plot is no less labyrinthine. The plot is full of misdirection and red herrings in the form of apathetic schoolboy car thieves, fake kidnappings, partying pornographers, and sleazy detectives. Yet the Dude’s motivation lies simply in the mission to tie his room together by replacing his soiled rug after a comically Hithcockian case of mistaken identity that involves spiteful rug-pissers. Everything spirals from that simple plot point into complete anarchy. It seems convoluted upon the first viewing, but becomes more rich (and hilarious) with each subsequent viewing.
The film makes its debut on a deluxe Blu-ray this week. Though I’m a huge fan, I don’t think I’ll be trading in my DVD copy from Focus Features any time soon. The Big Lebowski is a film that I don’t feel the urge to enjoy in high definition, I don’t really need to see every hair on The Dude’s face, or the taste-buds on John Turturro’s tongue as he licks his bowling ball. Not to discourage the hardcore fans though, it does come in one of those excellent Blu-ray books and gives the film the prestige its earned, making for a release fans can enjoy
Available on Blu-ray
Other Noteworthy Releases
The Ward: John Carpenter makes his return to feature films for the first time since Ghosts of Mars in 2001. Carpenter is one of my favorite genre directors, having produced great movies like Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, Escape From New York, The Thing, and Big Trouble in Little China. The man lost his touch during the nineties, one hopes The Ward will display the man’s great talents the way some of his later work has failed to do. Regardless, he is still a giant of genre cinema, I’ll watch anything he’s involved with.
Something Borrowed: Christian Toto eviscerated this movie with a check-list of today’s rom-com cliches this movie finds itself stuck in. The rom-com is a genre that seems to have been overtaken by the bromance for the most part, and this film doesn’t seem to serve as a glass of cold water in the midst of a drought, it’s just another parched, plain grain of sand.
Available on Blu-ray/DVD combo, Blu-ray, and DVD
Priest: A film starring Paul Bettany from the director of Legion, which was a pulpy action-horror flick that had its moments, but failed to impress. Priest is one of those odd instances where Hollywood adapts an Eastern comic book, something that rarely turns out well. People planning to buy or rent this movie should note that the R-rated version is the only one being made available on DVD, whereas the unrated cut of the movie will be available exclusively on the Blu-ray format. Knowing so-called “unrated” cuts though, you probably aren’t missing much.
Available on 3D Blu-ray, Blu-ray, and DVD
The Conspirator: This Robert Redford-directed film about the trial of Mary Surratt, a woman who was convicted and executed for being a part of the conspiracy to murder Abraham Lincoln, is supposed to serve as an allegory for the Bush administration and their approach to the war on terror. The iconic image of Lincoln on the poster silently judging the proceedings of the plot causes one to wonder if Redford is aware of the fact that Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War. It also makes one wonder if he’s aware that his allegory could be applied to our current president whom Hollywood seems to love so dearly.
Jane Eyre: Cary Fukunaga’s acclaimed adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender isn’t just available for streaming over at Amazon anymore.
The Killing: Stanley Kubrick’s early noir classic comes to Criterion. Kubrick wrote this film with Jim Thompson, the pulp writer behind great novels like The Grifters and The Killer Inside Me.
Cul-de-sac: An early film from Big Hollywood’s nemesis and Hollywood’s favorite child molester, Roman Polanski. Available from Criterion.
Cobra: This is the movie where Sylvester Stallone taught me that cutting your pizza with scissors is somehow more masculine.
Available on Blu-ray
Demolition Man: I still await the future prophesied in this film, where all restaurants are Taco Bell.
Available on Blu-ray
This article originally appeared over at Parcbench
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