randomWalks

Matt Zoller Seitz takes a look at a recent run of movies and how they deal with themes of revenge and redemption:

Just as Cash's song was inspired by a dream, the new Dawn is one of many recent movies that seems to have been dreamed up by the industry. Recent history has seeped into movies, and manifested itself in powerful, if mostly oblique, ways. With some overlap, the movies tend to fit into one of two categories: revenge dramas and religious pictures.

The revenge dramas generally suggest one of two opposed conclusions: revenge is troubling but necessary (A Man Apart, Walking Tall, Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2) or a life-altering mistake (21 Grams, Mystic River). The religious movies aren't religious in the sense that they advocate a particular religious point of view or dramatize a religious story (though The Passion of the Christ does both). They're religious in the sense that they presuppose and invite a religious view of life. They assume there's a higher power and perhaps a hell. They assume that good and evil are not rhetorical abstractions, but words to describe real cosmic forces at war in the universe and inside each person.

Like dreams, these movies are coded, half-involuntary responses to a post-9/11 world, and the fears of war, religious unrest, mass death and spiritual reckoning the event hatched. The movies are not precise or even outwardly purposeful, and none deals specifically with politics. But they are still movie dreams that work through real anxieties.

originally posted by zagg