La película no acaba con la muerte de Christine como cabría esperar si no que continúa con la escena de cierre en la que tras ver como los principales canales nacionales daban la noticia reduciéndola prácticamente al titular final, vemos cómo Jean, el personaje que más amistad y cercanía tenía con Christine fuera de su entorno familiar, prepara un discurso para el funeral haciendo una pequeña biografía y buscando unas imágenes de archivo de Christine en la que volvemos a verla como al principio de la película encuadrada en la pantalla, en color sepia, como un recuerdo, entrevistando y haciendo los reportajes que a ella le gustaban rindiéndole así homenaje.
Luego vemos a Jean llegar a su casa y comer helado mientras escucha y canta la cancion de Mary Tyler Show “love is all around” para combatir la enorme tristeza que siente y se escucha al presidente Ford hablar sobre porqué concede el perdón presidencial a Nixon en la tele, (esto fue ya en septiembre) alegando que el hecho de haber dimitido ya es castigo suficiente y que el país tiene que enfrentarse a otros problemas, es decir es como si el mensaje final de la historta fuera: no hagais leña del árbol caído, no reduzcais su vida a su último acto, intentad ser objetiv@s y tratad de conocer el “Cómo” para llegar a intentar entender sin justificar el “por qué”, la vida sigue.
1st) Screenwriter Craig Shilowiz, who suffered prolonged depressive episodes in his youth, knew the story of Christine Chubbuck when he rode a list of «rare deaths» on Wikipedia while he was documenting to write another script and began to take an interest on Christine because he founded many elements with he felt identified.
That same year, 2007, a documentary series called “Boulevard of broken dreams” was made one of them dedicated to Christine Chubbuck telling her story as well as testimonies from people who knew and worked with her including her brother Greg, which was the first time he had spoken in public about Christine since the event. Craig contacted the producer of the program and they gave him all the documentation they had gathered based on what he himself began to gather more documentation and interview people who knew her for two years.
He tried, based on his own experience, to write the story from the perspective of a woman with these depressive disorders, who works as a journalist and TV anchorwoman in the mid-seventies. The objective was to humanize the character and not only reduce it to the headline we all know trying to explain how to understand why without ever entering into subjectivity.
2nd) Rebecca Hall, did not know the story of Christine Chubbuck and although at first she was not very encouraged to participate in the project because she was somehow shocked by the summary of the content of the script that her agent passed her, she ended accepting and prepared for three months the character, watching movies of the seventies; studying the time and reading many books of mental disorders and suicide but she decided that she would not talk to anyone who had met Christine and she would only based the charater on the work that Craig Shilowiz had performed. She only had a 15-minute video in which Christine Chubbuck conducted an interview on his morning program Suncoast Digest. That same video is the one that is later represented in the film when Christine conducts the hospital zoning interview and decides to include another video at the last moment to better illustrate the news.
3rd) It was ranked as the fourth best film in the «biopic» genre of the last decade.
4th) Many of the pictures that appear in Christine’s room are actually pictures of Christine Chubbuck in her childhood and teenage.
6th) The last song heard in the film, “The Mary Tyler Show” theme it´s sung by Jeane while she is eating ice cream and is a song that Christine Chubbuck said she heard when she was sad. This program was broadcasted from 1970 to 1977 and it was about a single 30-year-old woman who changes her citiy for a disappointment and she ends up working on a TV station and the story presented to us in Christine is like Mary Tyler story would have gone all wrong.
7th) The character of Mike Nelson (Tracy Letts) is based much more on the relationship that Christine had with Bob Nelson, the owner of the station that in the movie is a rather secondary character whose sole purpose seems to be to ignore Christine and give her the «coup de grâce», which she couldn’t stand because he was really the one who wanted to raise the audience with the morbid.
8th) Mike Simmons, in real life, the news director, was even a couple of years younger than her and did have a strong discussion with Christine three days before she died because he withdrew one of his stories for another from a shooting. During another discussion, with him, Christine raged for some artificial flowers that Mike had put on the set the previous week, she throwing them through the air and shouting: “I won’t have these damned things in my studio.”
9º) The character of Jean Reed (María Dizzia) is a mixture between Jean Reed herself, Andrea Kirby, who was Christine´s best friend or the closest person in her work environment and who in the film is a practically irrelevant character and other colleagues such as true weatherman, Steve Newman, who was something like an intern, was only 19 years old and Gordon Galbraith, a station technician who was responsible for that last video of the shooting was stuck and witnessed the facts from the control room as seen in the movie with the character of Steve Turner, the weatherman
10º) Despite her daughter’s problems, Peg Chubbuck decided not to say anything about Christine´s situation on the station for fear she was fired. Christine Chubbuck had attempted suicide in 1970 through an overdose of pills and had been suffering from depressive problems since teenage.
11º) After shoot herself, many of Christine’s partners thought it was a heavy and macabre joke, as shown in the movie.
12º) Actually, for Christine Chubbuck, the fact of being a virgin about to turn thirty did not seem to be a cause for shame, in fact she used to say it without any hesitation and even one time, while they´re doing a joke informative, something like an essay, she presented herself as «Pristine Buttocks» saying something like: «Good morning, this is» Pristine Buttocks «and this are the news».
13º) It is true that Christine Chubbuck had gynecological problems in fact her right ovary was removed, but it was in the summer before her death. The doctors told her that if she didn’t get pregnant in the next couple of years, he probably wouldn’t be able to be a mother.
14º) Christine Chubbuck was volunteering at the Sarasota Memorial Hospital representing puppet shows for children with functional diversity.
15º) Christine Chubbuck’s relationship with George Peter Ryan, he was actually called «Georgeus George», was not exactly as the movie shows. Although they had been working together for almost a year at the beginning they did not like each other. George had quite a few personal problems saying that Christine was unattractive, very professional and competitive, that she did her job very well the same as or better than a man and that she found her «like a pain in the ass» and Christine even seemed to hate him but then George started to practice «T. A» and improved, he even wanted Christine to try it but she was reluctant. The last six months in which they worked together began to “stand” and have some friendship. Christine Chubbuck fell in love with George Peter Ryan and confessed to her best friend Andrea Kirby that he was the right man to have a relationship and solve her problems. Christine Chubbuck made a cake for him on George’s 30th birthday, at the end of June, and hinted him that she wanted to have a relationship but he rejected her. Shortly after Christine discovered that George and Andrea were having an affair and that Andrea would leave for work in Baltimore in a short time leaving her without her main support.
16º) Actually Christine Chubbuck had two serious romantic relationships throughout her life. The first one, when she was 16 years old and her boyfriend 23 ended tragically when he died in a traffic accident and the second one, when Christine was 21 years old ended because her father objected since Christine’s partner was older than her and also Jewish.
17º ) Three weeks before her death, Christine asked permission at the station to make a report about suicide, when they gave green lightl she went to the police station and asked about the methods of suicide. The officer who attended her told Christine that he would use a 38-caliber revolver with “Wadcutter” bullets (hollow-tipped) that exploded at contact disintegrating inside the body causing a lot of internal damage and he won´t shoot in the temple but in the skull base to make sure it would succeed.
18º) In the middle of the story, Christine is home alone watching a 1962 movie titled «Carnival of Souls» in which a woman, a professional organist, after suffering a traumatic experience of a traffic accident and being the only survivor, moves to another city to start over but she begins to inexplicably become obsessed with the ruins of an abandoned amusement park in the town and be harassed by what she looks like ghosts as well as hallucinations in which no one hears her, even as if she did not exist, with which the woman begins to have strange and hysterical behaviors becoming fired from her job and rejected by her surroundings. It may be coincidence but the plot of this film coincides quite with the story of Christine.
19º) In 1976 the movie «Network» directed by Sydney Lumet and starring Faye Dunaway and Peter Finch (who won the Oscars, in the case of the posthumous actor) was directly or indirectly inspired by the story of Christine Chubbuck and it digs into the fact of prostituting journalism by turning it into a product to earn money and incidentally manipulate the masses through television.
20º) The same year of the premiere of Christine, 2016, another film was presented on the same theme entitled «Kate plays Christine» in which actress Kate Lyn Sheil tries to document herself to play Christine Chubbuck in an alleged film about her visiting authentic places in Those who Christine worked, lived, talking with people who knew her without understanding her motivations. The director of the film Robert Greene said in an interview that his film was about demonstrating the impossibility of making a film about Christine Chubbuck. (At least in documentary terms).
21º) The journalist Sally Quinn published in August 1974 the famous Christine Chubbuck´s article in which she exposes in a quite complete way the circumstances of her. It was titled: Christine Chubbuck. 29. Good looking. Educated A television personality. Dead. Live and in color.
22º) Tracy Letts, the actor who gives life to Mike Nelson brilliantly, is also a writer and in 2008 he won the Pullytzer Prize for «August: Osage County» from which he made a film of the same name in 2013, starring Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts and Ewan McGregor among others.
23º) In 2003, the writer Christopher Sorrentino published a short story about Christine Chubbuck entitled «Condition» in number 40 of the magazine «Conjunctions» in which he used Cooper’s color test as shown as the film.
Se trata de una película que sorprende, sobre todo por su refrescante planteamiento tratando la crucifixión y resurrección de Jesús desde el punto de vista romano en la persona de un tribuno( una especie de capitán o comandante militar) interpretado por un siempre talentoso y capaz Joseph Fiennes al que el propio Pilatos le encarga la supervisión de la ejecución de un sedicioso alborotador que se proclama mesias de los judíos, un tal Jesús de Nazareth interpretado con suficiencia y buena caracterización por Cliff Curtis . Una vez completada la misión que para el tribuno resulta degradante y habiendo observado ciertos sucesos inexplicables es llamado a la presencia de Pilatos para investigar la desaparición del cadáver del crucificado lo que le toca aún más la moral al pobre tribuno y del que se sospecha ha sido robado del sepulcro donde lo habían depositado para hacer creer al pueblo que había resucitado confirmando así la sospecha de que se trataba del mesías( según el profeta Isaías en el Antiguo Testamento).
¿No es ese Brian de Nazareth?
Se inicia así una suerte de labor detectivesca en la que el escéptico tribuno comienza a toparse a medida que profundiza en la investigación con más y más dudas acerca de si la versión del robo del cuerpo y no la de la resurrección sería la incorrecta empezando una suerte de deriva metafísica y aquí es donde la película flaquea un poco ya que el factor religioso en la figura de Jesús resucitado parece primar sobre el racional e histórico de forma que el personaje del tribuno hace finalmente «catacroquer» convenciéndose de que Jesús era ciertamente el mesías y que había resucitado por lo que decide abandonar su vida anterior convirtiéndose en una especie de eremita errante.
«me cago en mi vida»
Una película entretenida y como digo bien hecha para aquell@s que les gusten los thrillers detectivescos así como las películas de temática puramente religiosa.
La crucifixión, la peor y más cruel manera de morir que muchas civilizaciones y concretamente los romanos usaban para ajusticiar a personas normalmente de baja extracción social como esclavos fugados o contra aquellos que se rebelaban contra Roma. Lo que llamaban «mors agravata».
A pesar de que los romanos la utilizaron durante cuatrocientos años no existen casi pruebas de como la llevaban a cabo y la referencia más común que tenemos sobre ella se encuentra en la iconografía cristiana con las representaciones de la crucifixión de Jesús. Una de las pocas pruebas que existen de este tipo de ejecución se encuentra en el museo de Israel y pertenece a un hombre llamado Yeohanán que fue crucificado en el siglo I d.c
En la crucifixión, la muerte se producía por asfixia debido a la posición de los brazos elevados de forma que cada vez que el condenado respiraba, la caja torácica no se expandía lo suficiente haciendo que la persona intentase apoyar el peso del cuerpo en brazos y piernas que eran atravesadas con clavos, en algunos casos, afectando al nervio mediano que se sitúa justo en el espacio de de Destot en la muñeca y el tibial en los pies o talones que atravesaba el clavo provocando un dolor insoportable con lo que cada vez que se inspiraba se sufría un dolor intensísimo y la persona debía dejar la inspiración, respirando cada vez menso oxígeno haciendo que el condenado se asfixiase lentamente en una angustiosa agonía que podía durar días dependiendo de la fortaleza física de la persona y de la gravedad del delito que había cometido.
Para acelerar el proceso se rompían las piernas de la persona impidiéndole así obtener esa pequeña brizna de aire y haciendo que muriese asfixiada con mayor rapidez.
Curiosamente los cristianos no adoptaron el símbolo de la cruz hasta el siglo V unos cien años después de que Roma dejara de utilizarla como método de ejecución.
Con el precedente de la última trilogía y teniendo en cuenta que se trataba de un producto de Disney la verdad es que no albergaba muchas esperanzas con respecto a esta serie, de hecho la única razón que me hizo empezar a verla fue el hecho de creer que el protagonista era Bobba Fett y a lo largo de los ocho capítulos de esta primera temporada comprobé mi error disfrutando de unos personajes carismáticos; empezando por el protagonista, el mandaloriano, una suerte de mezcla ente el Clint Eastwood de Sergio leone y un samurai; el «yodita» que le da un toque muy bueno y te hace morir de amor literamente, el personaje del granjero al que le pone voz Nick Nolte que es una especie de Zaratustra Niestzcheciano; el droide cazarrecompensas o la mercenaria exsoldado de asalto del Imperio que si te pega una hostia te viste de torero.
Unas interpretaciones muy buenas destacando la de Pedro Pascal se marca un «Edward Norton» en el reino de los cielos actuando con una máscara el 99,9% de la serie de forma que parece que lo hace sin ella; un argumento que aunque no es lineal, ya que cada capítulo puede verse de forma independiente casi sin perder el hilo se encadena de forma que todos las tramas y personajes que van saliendo tiene un fin y un porque terminando por cerrar un engranaje argumental muy inteligente y entretenido. Muy recomendable para pasar el rato.
Bruxismo nocturno 