Showing on Netflix, A Week Away (2021) is an obtuse, unimaginative and unfunny Christian musical comedy. There are good inspirational and spiritual pop songs performed in it, but a well-written ditty about Christian life like Steven Curtis Chapman’s “The Great Adventure” deserves to be in a better flick. So does the felt Michael W. Smith ballad, “Place in this World” and, to a lesser extent, Rich Mullins’s “Awesome God.” These are all old songs, fortunately—they’re melodic—and pleasantly sung. But this movie, which is even quite unfocused, is a very rickety vehicle.

Reviews are by Dean

A woman, unnamed, travels from London to Greece to find her husband, Christopher, whom she plans to ask for a divorce. Separation inheres in A Separation (2017), a fine novel by Katie Kitamura, which has a great deal to do with vicissitudes in people’s lives. Christopher is missing; startling mystery surrounds him. The novel yields the question of how should, or must, we live, but gives no answer. It does give us material compelling and not commercial, seamless and apolitical.

Reviews are by Dean

Angry enough to attempt to kill a decent man with whom he is feuding, Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) is a very faulty dude who becomes a better one after outlaws temporarily spend time in his town. Inclined to bully and steal, army captain Bruhn (Burl Ives) is the disgraced leader of the crooks. The Day of the Outlaw, in a 1959 movie of the same name, has descended, in proper black and white and with some agreeable visuals.

Re the latter, Tina Louise is marvelously beautiful. And long and medium-long shots reveal majestic wintry landscapes, exactly right and not too pretty for a Western. Directed by Andre de Toth, Day of the Outlaw tells a not-bad story, even if the roughing-it action near the end needs a pacemaker.

The Scottish Muriel Spark was an unusual tragicomic artist, a bright Catholic author. Her sixty-page tale, “The Go-Away Bird,” revolves around the orphaned Daphne du Toit, who lives with her guardian, white Chakata, in a British colony in Africa. When she is not there, she is in England, having disappointing, even adulterous, love affairs and being exploited for money by one Greta Casse. In the African colony, however, sinister aggression arises. Spark informs us of the following: “Daphne called aloud, ‘God help me. Life is unbearable.'” The utter insufficiency of human relationships is one of the story’s themes. So—for all the story’s droll content—is death as liberation.

Daphne frequently responds to people’s words by saying, “Oh, I see” and, to be sure, she will see what is ultimately true. A Catholic, Spark nevertheless does not believe, as I do not, in eternal Hell. No doubt she does believe in divine judgment. Death, in any case, is liberation in what is perhaps a Catholic universalism in the superb “The Go-Away Bird.”

In Suicide Killers, a 2006 documentary by Pierre Rehov, would-be Muslim suicide bombers prove they are eaten up with religion.  Bad religion.  Arabs who abhor the bombers’ violence are here too, and they also are Muslims.  One of them, an Israeli Arab, says he was completely changed by the experience of a Jewish woman dying in his arms after a jihadist explosion.  This is rational, but irrationality is what carries the day.  To a Palestinian terrorist, to kill a Jew is to serve Allah:  One of them tells himself, “You didn’t kill them, God killed them” . . . The Israeli bombing survivors whom Rehov interviews—all of whom are women (why no men?)—are not exactly insouciant about the jihadist attacks.  A woman named Yael was so traumatized she is now “scared of everything.”  I’m glad Rehov didn’t neglect these survivors.

The movie touches on the poverty of the Palestinian people, but also on the tendency of Arab dictatorships to keep their people poor—people who firmly believe in the hereafter and are so often anti-Jewish.  A recipe for terrorist action, this.

Suicide Killers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)