Posted on 09/23/2012 7:59:06 AM PDT by murron
I loved this movie from beginning to end.
Movie was what I expected. Red meat for conservatives and enjoyable, although I doubt anyone other than conservatives are going to go see it. I didn’t expect an Oscar worthy film (kind of like those films that church in Athens, Ga makes) but just wanted to be entertained (I was). I didn’t appreciate the spam text message the film company sent out about the movie a few weeks before the release though.
OK have not heard about it...what is it about?
Spam text?
Life is so hard.
How else was anyone going to know this film even existed, given its subject.
Cinematography: A
Acting: B+
Story: D
Yes this is a true story and yes there is a great story here, but the way it is told is poor. First, there is no explanation of why the government so quickly turned on the Church. The fact is, the Church had enemies, and not just because it "stood for Christ." Over the years it was associated with "inequities in wealth" and all that stuff. You and I might not buy it, but it's crucial to a STORY plot to have a bad guy who isn't cardboard, as Reuben Blades is.
Also---sorry---there is not enough difference in the main Mexican characters to tell them apart, or what their motivations are (aside from Andy Garcia). Did not connect with me.
The movie was released on the 11th in DVD and has been playing on DISH ppv.
The Christero War against President Callas in the 20’s who shut down the Catholic Church, murdered priests and practicing peasants. Amazing valor of the people of Mexico who pushedback for freedom of religion.
When I was in grade school in the 1950’s we read about Fr. Miguel Pro and how he shouted “Viva el Cristo Rey!” at his execution.
In high school we read Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory”. Bounty of thousands of pesos for denouncing a priest to the authorities. Clerical garb prohibited.
In the late 1960’s Mexican mural art was still denigrating the Catholic Church as a pawn of the capitalist establishment (a priest in the confessional tells the penitents to “obey your bosses blindly”).
The Cristero Revolt needs to be remembered very much.
One of the problems the writers had, I thought, is that nobody in the US knows a thing about the Mexican Revolution and the players involved, nor do they know about the involvement of the US and even the European powers in this lengthy affair. So they would have had to have given everyone a massive history lesson at the start, and while they did try to fill in some of the bigger knowledge gaps, I think it was beyond the scope of the film to be able to provide a full background for the action.
If a film is set during the Civil War, for example, you can assume that most people (well, over the age of 40) have some idea what it is. But most people don’t even know that Mexico had a revolution, let alone why.
“It was so hard to believe that this happened so close to us and not that long ago.”
I know, I had no idea that anything like that happened. Mexico is so religious, so Catholic, and the Government tried to ban the Church. Incredible.
It shows that the battles we are fighting today have been going on for longer than we realize.
The French did this too in their Revolution. I never realized how much they turned against the church too until I read the book “Citizens”.
Saw plenty of commercials on TV for it and heard them on the radio. I'll be happy to give your info to the studios though to make sure you get texts about every new release since you seem to love to idea.
I’m surprised at the responses I’m getting here. There are so few movies out there that show the Church in any kind of a good light, it made me appreciate this one even more. There was no profanity and none of the other usual liberal things that are put in movies these days.
I also appreciated attending Mass even more today after seeing this movie. I have little knowledge of the Mexican Revolution, and I also didn’t need to know why the Mexican President made the decision he did. Catholics and Christians have been targeted throughout history for many reasons, usually because they pose a threat to the ruling government in some way. I had goosebumps watching this movie from start to finish.
Actually, the credits are even better than the ending. Awe-inspiring.
Poor you.
I found myself muttering a prayer of thanksgiving for every sound promoting this movie. It was hunting for a needle in a hay stack to find a theater willing to run it and it was around for one lousy week end and five work days, then pffft, it was gone.
Notable, are posters here who are just now hearing of For Greater Glory.
I loved the movie, and as I said above, I think one of its big handicaps is that nobody in the US even knows that Mexico had a revolution ( not to mention our participation in it, to protect the oil).
I wish more people knew the real history of Mexico; I bet even a lot of the Mexico-haters here would change their tune then.
The war was an expression of the atheistic secularism, which in ethos is eerily similar to what is heard today (see on Constitution below)
Yet under Catholic theocracies (and early Protestant versions) suppression of freedom of religion was also great, including (in Catholicism) free reading of the Scriptures.
Wikipedia: The Cristero War (1926-29) also known as La Cristiada, was a mass popular uprising and attempted counter-revolution against the anti-Catholicism of the ruling Mexican government. Based in western Mexico, the rebellion was set off by the enforcement of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 by former Mexican President and atheist Plutarco Elias Calles, in order to persecute the Roman Catholic Church and its sub-organizations - a move inspired by Calles’ atheism and freemasonry.
The Political Constitution of the United Mexican States was redacted by the Constitutional Congress convoked by Venustiano Carranza in September 1916, and it was approved on 5 February 1917. The new constitution was based in the previous one instituted by Benito Juárez in 1857. Three of its 136 articles—3, 27 and 130—contain heavily secularing sections.
The first two sections of article 3 state:
I. According to the religious liberties established under article 24, educational services shall be secular and, therefore, free of any religious orientation.
II. The educational services shall be based on scientific progress and shall fight against ignorance, ignorance’s effects, servitudes, fanaticism and prejudice.[5]
The second section of article 27 states that: All religious associations organized according to article 130 and its derived legislation, shall be authorized to acquire, possess or manage just the necessary assets to achieve their objectives.[5]
The first paragraph of article 130[6] states that: The rules established at this article are guided by the historical principle according to which the State and the churches are separated entities from each other. Churches and religious congregations shall be organized under the law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristero_War
The real story is too often Mexicans changed one rotten system for another. In some 400 years Mexico has never been a nation based on the respect for and the rule of law.
Actually, Mexico has always been based on the respect for law because it was founded by Spain, which had a highly developed legal system, a concept of rights, and even, in fact, legal theory on individual liberty and controls on the power of the state that predated and was the foundation for the thought of some of the US founders (that’s the reason that the bust of the 16th century Spanish Jesuit political philospher Suarez is in front of the UN).
It was actually the Spanish who first brought a legal system to what is now the United States, in Florida - some 60 years before Jamestown.
Some of the problems of Mexico were, ironically, the result of the fact that the Spanish were better colonists than the British and did not kill off the Indian population. Hence, they had the huge task of integrating people who were completely unaccustomed to European ways and systems. Once the Indians had been Christianized, their villages were essentially self-governing, but under the supervision of a large land-owner who had acquired title to the land from the King with the commitment to settle it, collect taxes from the inhabitants, and produce raw materials (as in the British colonies, the mother country did not want the colonies producing finished goods and competing with it, and as a result seriously restricted commercial development in the colonies).
This was bound to lead to abuses, and many of the problems in Mexico and Latin America in general came from unequal land ownership.
Independence came later to the Spanish colonies than to the British colony that became the US. Mexico became independent in 1821, but in the meantime, Spain had been invaded by Napoleon and Spain itself was somewhat destabilized after its own War of Independence (from Napoleon). It was also powerless to keep or protect its colonies or former colonies.
One of the major problems experienced by Mexico until fairly recent times was the intervention in its politics of European nations, ranging from France to Germany to Russia; this is a problem that, for a variety of reasons, we never had to face. Don’t forget that in the Second French Empire period (around the time of the US Civil War), the French invaded Mexico and installed a Hapsburg, Maximilian, as “Emperor of Mexico.”
And then later Mexico became a favorite refuge of European intellectuals fleeing their home countries; most of these “intellectuals” seem to have been Marxists or anarchists, unfortunately, something that had a very negative impact on Mexico’s own political/intellectual class.
So Mexico’s history is both longer and much more complicated than ours, and most Americans are completely ignorant of it.
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