Every movie, if it’s any good, has some kind of message.  Often, the message is fairly subtle subtext, hidden within the primary purpose of entertaining the audience.  Sometimes the message is overt, where there is no question what the movie is trying to say.  Promised Land (available on DVD and Blu-ray at VPL), is of the second variety.

Matt Damon plays a corporate salesman who, along with his partner, played by Frances McDormand, seeks to buy land leases from the property owners of the economically depressed farming town of McKinley.  They are doing this on behalf of Global Crosspower Solutions, a multi-billion dollar natural gas company.  At the town hall meeting, meant to be an announcement more than a sales pitch, they encounter unexpected resistance led by a retired engineer and school teacher, played by the venerable 88 year-old Hal Holbrook.  He points out that the process of retrieving the natural gas, known as fracking, is not without risks to the people and the environment.  So, what was expected to be a two or three day cakewalk for the company, becomes a three-week slog leading to a vote by the entire town.

The opponents of the gas company are bolstered by the arrival of an engaging young environmentalist, played by John Krasinski, from a previously unknown group called Athena.  It soon becomes an all out war for the hearts and minds of the townspeople, and it looks like Global just might lose.

As I said at the beginning, the message of Promised Land is clear: multi-billion dollar corporations are ready and willing to exploit people in difficult financial straits, with little regard to their long term well-being or that of the environment, and will resort to any kind of manipulation in order to get their way.  The writers and the director have a very particular point to make, and are not subtle about making it.  I won’t hesitate to say that the movie is well-written, well-performed, and beautifully shot, but the message is delivered with a sledgehammer.

Runnig time: 1 hour 47 minutes.  Special features of the DVD include: The Making of Promised Land, and an alternate scene, mistakenly referred to as an Extended Scene.

As the 2013 NHL playoffs begin, a tournament that many fans didn’t expect to see, it’s a good time to pause and think about some of the perhaps lesser known players of the league.  Well, maybe not lesser known, but players whose primary role didn’t involve making plays, scoring goals, or stopping shots.  It is a role that is much maligned, but that many would say is essential to making hockey the beautiful, brutal sport that it is.  That role is the Enforcer, the Tough Guy, or disparagingly, the Goon.

The Last Gladiators looks inside the world of the hockey tough guy through interviews with several of the most famous of these players, their friends and family, as well as some well-respected hockey observers.  Those interviewed are players that are well-remembered by hockey fans, including Terry O’Reilly, Donald Brashear, Tony Twist, Todd Ewen, Marty McSorley, and Bob Probert, who died during the making of this film.

The focus of this documentary, however, is Chris “Knuckles” Nilan, Boston-born, drafted fourth last by the Montreal Canadiens in the 1980 draft.  The players interviewed fought for many reasons, for the sake of dominance, for intimidation, to protect star players.  Some were reluctant fighters, while there was one who relished it, anticipated it, got off on it.  This player was Tony Twist of the St. Louis Blues.  At the end of his first contract with the team Twist felt he had earned a renewal.  However, the team opted not to renew.  He went on a long motorcycle ride to clear his head, but suffered injuries in a collision that ended his career.  I’m not surprised that the Blues didn’t renew his contract.  The way he described his role as a fighter sounded to me that he was doing it mostly for glory and personal gratification.  Of all the players interviewed, he probably is most deserving of the label of Goon.

Chris Nilan was not quite any of those things.  He was not the biggest guy in the world, but he was fearless.  From a young age he despised bullies, and took it very personally when he saw a weaker person being picked on, particularly one of his friends.  So, he would never hesitate to come to their defense.  He carried that attitude into the game he loved to play, right up to the NHL.  For that, even though he was from hated Boston, the players and fans of Montreal loved and embraced him.

His career peaked in Montreal when they won the Stanley Cup in 1986.  However, the attitude that had served him so well caused him to clash with a new coach who Nilan felt did not respect his teammates.  This clash forced the team to trade him to the New York Rangers.  Nilan saw this as the beginning of the end.  He was devastated to leave Montreal.  While he continued to play his role of tough guy with the Rangers and then Boston, that sense of fierce personal loyalty was gone.  When he retired, he found he could not fit in.  Again, the attitude that had served him so well as a player, failed him in the outside world, but he couldn’t find a way to turn it off.

He turned to and became dependent on alcohol and the painkillers he was taking for the numerous injuries he had suffered as a player.  They caused him to lose his marriage and nearly his life, and he is only now starting down the road to personal redemption, of which, I believe, this documentary is a part.

Human beings are hard-wired to enjoy sport.  Fans, not having the physical tools to perform at the highest level, live vicariously through these elite athletes.  This is not only true of the thrill of watching a highly skillful play, but in watching a fight.  Check yourself the next time you watch a hockey fight or an MMA fight.  I can guarantee that your hands will be balled into fists, throwing punches in the air.  Next to a goal being scored, a hockey fight brings the loudest cheers from the fans.

This film is called The Last Gladiators for a very good reason: NHL rule changes have greatly diminished the role of Enforcer.  If a player is deemed to have “instigated” a fight, he will be given an extra penalty.  So, while there are still fights, the era of personal protection for the star players is virtually over.  This raw, honest, unflinching film gives us a keen insight into the type of player that has essentially vanished from the NHL.  It has helped us to get to know them, not just as players, but as human beings with all their flaws.

Longlisted for the 2009 Giller Prize, the Heart Specialist by Claire Holden Rothman, her first, and only novel so far, opens in 1882 with a girl’s dreamlike memory of her father leaning over her in her bed, saying goodbye.  As it turns out, that goodbye is forever as Dr. Honoré Bourret flees Montreal under a cloud of suspicion of having murdered his crippled sister, despite being acquitted at trial.  He leaves behind his pregnant wife, and daughter Agnès.  The wife dies giving birth to Agnès’ sister Laure, leaving the girls to be raised by their maternal Grandmother White.  So Agnès and Laure Bourret became Agnes and Laure White.

Dr. Bourret was a pathologist and so had many medical specimens in his personal collection.  Agnes is curious and fascinated with these specimens and with her father’s medical specialty.  Her grandmother at first attempts to squelch that curiosity but relents under the persuasion of the girls’ new governess, Miss Skerry.  The highly gifted Agnes blossoms under Miss Skerry, and she soon finds herself top of her class in an elite Montreal prep school.  Luck and a little gentle arm-twisting persuades her grandmother to allow her to continue to McGill University, where she hopes to persuade the authorities there to allow her into the prestigious medical school.  Agnes is thwarted in her attempt to enter and to establish a parallel medical faculty for women.  (McGill did not graduate any women from their medical school until 1922, to their great shame).

Agnes sidestepped them and obtained her degree from Bishop’s College, who admitted her in an attempt to one-up McGill.  Despite this success, she was unable to establish herself until she was offered the job of curator of the medical museum at the McGill Medical School.  It being in total disarray, she sets out to organize it and discovers that many of the specimens had been harvested by her father and his protégé William Howlett, including a heart with a seemingly unique anomaly, dubbed “The Howlett Heart”.  During Agnes’ struggle to become a physician, Howlett had established himself as one of the pre-eminent physicians in North America.  Agnes brings the heart to him at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore to consult on it and finds herself falling under his thrall.  Howlett is impressed with her and becomes a benefactor for the museum.

Throughout all this the shadow of Honoré Bourret looms over Agnes, as she seeks to honor her father with her work.  Yet, the records surrounding the harvesting of the Howlett Heart are curiously inconsistent.  This inconsistency drives forward Agnes’ quest to find her father.  In fact, the arc of this entire story points to the moment when father and daughter meet again.  It is here that the story falls apart for me.

Some might criticize the author for glossing over large parts of Agnes’ life, particularly her time as an undergraduate at McGill and at med school at Bishop’s.  However, to go into great detail about that time would have perhaps made the book ponderous and caused undue delay in getting to the point the author was taking us.  Still, it made it appear as if Agnes’ struggle was not much of a struggle at all.  My real disappointment is with the meeting.

In good literature, one can hardly expect that the meeting would be a happy one, with all things forgiven, and everyone reconciled.  It was anything but.  After a long journey to find him, the meeting with her father was short and disappointing for Agnes, but most especially for the reader.  This was supposed to be the climax of the story, where the two either reconcile or have it out.  Neither happens.  Nothing happens.  The whole thing falls flat.  Instead of ending it here, where it should end, where everyone expects it to end, the author opts for cheap, sappy romance.  A truly disappointing ending to a well-written book.