![\"Liana](\"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/lastsineater.jpg\" "\\"lastsineater\\"")
Liana Liberato stars as Cadi Forbes in "The Last Sin Eater"<\/p><\/div>\n
The Importance of Being Earnest<\/span><\/em><\/h1>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
[xrr rating=3\/5]<\/p>\n
The Last Sin Eater.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Starring Louise Fletcher, Henry Thomas, Soren Fulton, A.J. Buckley, Stewart Finlay-McLennan, Peter Wingfield, Elizabeth Lackey, Thea Rose, Gabrielle Fitzpatrick, and introducing Liana Liberato. Music by Mark McKenzie. Cinematography by Robert Seaman. Screenplay by Brian Bird and Michael Landon, Jr., based on the novel by Francine Rivers. Edited and directed by Michael Landon, Jr. (FoxFaith, 2007, Color, 141 minutes. MPAA Rating: PG-13).<\/strong><\/p>\nAnother costume drama,\u00a0The Last Sin Eater\u00a0<\/em>tells a tale of redemption strikingly similar to\u00a0Pan\u2019s Labyrinth\u00a0<\/em>through its heroine, another girl on the cusp of adolescence and responsibility of adulthood. They also share a similar plot structure (the ordeal) and even the same stock characters. However, the two are worlds apart.<\/p>\nThe fledgling FoxFaith line of inspirational Christian movies released this picture. To me, it\u2019s kind of \u201cmade for TV\u201d filmmaking that\u2019s like the proverbial fingernails dragged down the chalkboard: Awkward, dramatically inconsistent performances (especially among the children actors); uneven pacing and slack editing; generic-looking costumes and sets; inter-cutting of 35mm location shots with what appears to be 16mm stock footage; and, a director who uses embarrassingly primitive special effects like \u201cChroma-Key\u201d bluescreen process, which Alfred Hitchcock deemed obsolete as long ago as 1962, when he made his terror classic\u00a0The Birds.<\/em>\u00a0Dismissed by most reviewers, don\u2019t hold your breath waiting for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to bestow its cherished imprimatur upon this \u201cnice try\u201d by a director whom the producers should have barred from the editing room.<\/p>\nAnd, although you might think I\u2019m gearing up to \u201cpan\u201d another film (pun intended), think twice. Why? Because, since I was a kid,\u00a0I don\u2019t watch movies simply to revel in their technical merits. I go because I want to be entertained, perhaps even enlightened, by a great story.<\/em><\/p>\nThe technically virtuosic\u00a0Pan\u2019s Labyrinth\u00a0<\/em>left me cold because it was all style and no substance. Yet, despite its glaring aesthetic deficits, I loved this one\u00a0precisely\u00a0<\/em>because it had the crucial ingredient the former lacked: A great story. More so than its message, a movie\u2019s story is its soul.<\/p>\nThe Last Sin Eater\u00a0<\/em>takes place in a Welsh settlement in 1850s Appalachia. Ten year-old Cadi Forbes (Liana Liberato) hides a dark secret that weighs heavy on her conscience. She tries hard to repress it, but an incident at her grandmother\u2019s funeral reopens the barely-healed wound.<\/p>\nAt her burial, something\u2019s horribly amiss: The ceremony, bereft of comforting eulogy, seems more of a witch\u2019s sabbath than a passing onto the next life. Held under the cover of darkness, Cadi\u2019s granny lies in state before the silent mourners, a piece of bread and a bladder full of wine lying on her chest.<\/p>\n
Cutting through the eerie stillness, a hooded figure appears, the Sin Eater (Peter Wingfield). He scarfs down the bread and gulps the wine, and in a sorrowful voice\u2014having cleansed the old woman\u2019s sins by condemning his own soul\u2014recites a solemn wish for her forgiveness. No one looks at or speaks to the Sin Eater (it\u2019s rumored that the very act of communicating with the wretched outcast brings eternal damnation) but while everyone\u2019s heads are gravely bowed, Cadi hears something painful yet oddly benign in his voice. She doesn\u2019t fear looking into his eyes, because she already feels doomed by her transgression.<\/p>\n
Cadi\u2019s identification with the Sin Eater soon becomes an obsession: Unable to live with herself, a couple days later she seeks him out. She goes into the mountains to find him, despite others\u2019 warnings.<\/p>\n
Here is\u00a0real<\/em>\u00a0heroism: Cadi\u2019s refusal to heed superstitious gossip and deny the evidence of her own experience buttresses her resolve to forge on in her quest. We soon learn her secret\u2014her sister\u2019s accidental death, by falling off a tree bridge over a waterfall\u2014was prompted, partly, by Cadi\u2019s stubbornness. However, her very intransigence is also the key to her eventual redemption.<\/p>\nAround this point, the plot comes to a standstill as it meanders. Unable to take the clumsy dialogue of the three child actors, I get ready to exit the theater. Only one thing keeps me pinned in my seat:\u00a0What will happen next?<\/em><\/p>\nCadi eventually tracks down the Sin Eater to his secret cave, he reluctantly performs the sin eating rite, never having done it for a living person. She feels nothing, and descends the mountain just as encumbered as she was going up.<\/p>\n
On her way home, she happens upon a Man of God (Henry Thomas) alone and preaching the gospel to no one in particular along the river. Seeing that she\u2019s troubled, he gets her to open up about her predicament. He laughs, and divulges to Cadi that the mortal Sin Eater cannot relieve her guilt, that long ago there was a true sin eater named Jesus Christ, whose grace has made it possible for her to be forgiven for her sins while still alive, rather than having to wear them like an albatross around her neck until death.<\/p>\n
Suddenly, Cadi feels the weight of the world lifted from her shoulders. She runs to tell everyone. \u201cKnow the truth, and the truth shall set you free.\u201d<\/p>\n
But now the\u00a0mystery<\/em>\u00a0has just begun. Why is the immigrant enclave ignorant of this common knowledge of Christ\u2019s salvation? Why must a doomed man endure ostracism, serving a miserable sentence performing atavistic pagan rituals?\u00a0 And why does village bully Brogan Kai (Stewart Finlay-McLennan, whose thuggish performance recalls Ward Bond and George Kennedy) corner the Man of God, killing this \u201coutsider,\u201d lest his words reach the village?<\/p>\nAs Cadi hides from Brogan, she returns to the mountain, where we find out the settlers\u2019 real sin, a secret that\u2019s haunted two generations. Cadi tells the Sin Eater the good news, but he\u2019s unable to accept the tragic fate of having been denied the love of the woman he loved, fathering children and a purposeful, fulfilling life for naught. His agony resonates deeply as he begs her off. \u201cIt means I will have wasted twenty years of my life in this cave and never saved a single soul from damnation,\u201d he cries, breaking down.<\/p>\n
Being an old-fashioned movie, Louise Fletcher (best known for her Oscar-winning role of sadistic Nurse Ratched in 1975\u2019s\u00a0One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest)<\/em>\u00a0as village elder Miz Elda is the movie\u2019s\u00a0Deux ex machina,<\/em>\u00a0who calls a town meeting that night to divulge the secret. Her testimony opens up a lot of old wounds, but, rather than burning the village to the ground a la avenging angel Clint Eastwood in his 1973 revenge fantasy\u00a0High Plains Drifter<\/em>, Elda\u2019s words instead lift the shadows of superstition and scapegoating that kept them in darkness.<\/p>\nThe Sin Eater renounces his dark avocation, becomes a preacher and saves souls instead in the sunlight by the river. The movie closes with Cadi exclaiming its moral, that she\u2019s been set free because Christ died for her sins. Not very subtle, but consider the context and target audience.<\/p>\n
But, that audience already\u00a0knows<\/em>\u00a0that bit of information. The moral was a rather ingenious MacGuffin for a life-affirming message that sin is an aberration, not man\u2019s constant state and a this-worldly metaphysics that individuals have the inherent right and dignity to live as\u00a0men, not<\/em>\u00a0objects of sacrifice. In other words, \u201cJesus died for our sins,\u00a0so now we can all get on with the business of living.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nMaybe it\u2019s not just the sex, moral decadence and profanity driving the faithful to these new religious pictures. From the looks of this one, maybe it\u2019s not only preaching to the choir, either. Perhaps, just like everyone else staying away in droves from movie theaters nowadays, they too just want to see motion pictures that tell fascinating stories, project a benevolent sense of life and present man as clean, heroic, and productive.<\/p>\n
And maybe, just maybe, they\u2019re getting fed-up with being patronized as unsophisticated rubes for wanting everybody to live\u2014horror of horrors\u2014happily ever after.<\/p>\n
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in\u00a0<\/span>Black & White Magazine<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Entrepreneur<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Hoy! New York<\/span><\/span>, the New York\u00a0<\/span>Post<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>RCA Victor\u00a0<\/span>(Japan)<\/span><\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>Scene in San Antonio<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Spirit Magazine<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(Canada),\u00a0<\/span>Top Producer<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0 and the Trenton\u00a0<\/span>Times<\/span><\/span>. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of\u00a0<\/span>The New Individualist<\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0 The Importance of Being Earnest \u00a0 [xrr rating=3\/5] The Last Sin Eater.\u00a0Starring Louise Fletcher, Henry Thomas, Soren Fulton, A.J. Buckley, Stewart Finlay-McLennan, Peter Wingfield, Elizabeth Lackey, Thea Rose, Gabrielle Fitzpatrick, and introducing Liana Liberato. Music by Mark McKenzie. Cinematography by Robert Seaman. Screenplay by Brian Bird and Michael Landon, Jr., based on the novel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76,47,35,3,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-movies","category-costume-dramas","category-dramas","category-mreview","category-religious-dramas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":494,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions\/494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Another costume drama,\u00a0The Last Sin Eater\u00a0<\/em>tells a tale of redemption strikingly similar to\u00a0Pan\u2019s Labyrinth\u00a0<\/em>through its heroine, another girl on the cusp of adolescence and responsibility of adulthood. They also share a similar plot structure (the ordeal) and even the same stock characters. However, the two are worlds apart.<\/p>\n The fledgling FoxFaith line of inspirational Christian movies released this picture. To me, it\u2019s kind of \u201cmade for TV\u201d filmmaking that\u2019s like the proverbial fingernails dragged down the chalkboard: Awkward, dramatically inconsistent performances (especially among the children actors); uneven pacing and slack editing; generic-looking costumes and sets; inter-cutting of 35mm location shots with what appears to be 16mm stock footage; and, a director who uses embarrassingly primitive special effects like \u201cChroma-Key\u201d bluescreen process, which Alfred Hitchcock deemed obsolete as long ago as 1962, when he made his terror classic\u00a0The Birds.<\/em>\u00a0Dismissed by most reviewers, don\u2019t hold your breath waiting for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to bestow its cherished imprimatur upon this \u201cnice try\u201d by a director whom the producers should have barred from the editing room.<\/p>\n And, although you might think I\u2019m gearing up to \u201cpan\u201d another film (pun intended), think twice. Why? Because, since I was a kid,\u00a0I don\u2019t watch movies simply to revel in their technical merits. I go because I want to be entertained, perhaps even enlightened, by a great story.<\/em><\/p>\n The technically virtuosic\u00a0Pan\u2019s Labyrinth\u00a0<\/em>left me cold because it was all style and no substance. Yet, despite its glaring aesthetic deficits, I loved this one\u00a0precisely\u00a0<\/em>because it had the crucial ingredient the former lacked: A great story. More so than its message, a movie\u2019s story is its soul.<\/p>\n The Last Sin Eater\u00a0<\/em>takes place in a Welsh settlement in 1850s Appalachia. Ten year-old Cadi Forbes (Liana Liberato) hides a dark secret that weighs heavy on her conscience. She tries hard to repress it, but an incident at her grandmother\u2019s funeral reopens the barely-healed wound.<\/p>\n At her burial, something\u2019s horribly amiss: The ceremony, bereft of comforting eulogy, seems more of a witch\u2019s sabbath than a passing onto the next life. Held under the cover of darkness, Cadi\u2019s granny lies in state before the silent mourners, a piece of bread and a bladder full of wine lying on her chest.<\/p>\n Cutting through the eerie stillness, a hooded figure appears, the Sin Eater (Peter Wingfield). He scarfs down the bread and gulps the wine, and in a sorrowful voice\u2014having cleansed the old woman\u2019s sins by condemning his own soul\u2014recites a solemn wish for her forgiveness. No one looks at or speaks to the Sin Eater (it\u2019s rumored that the very act of communicating with the wretched outcast brings eternal damnation) but while everyone\u2019s heads are gravely bowed, Cadi hears something painful yet oddly benign in his voice. She doesn\u2019t fear looking into his eyes, because she already feels doomed by her transgression.<\/p>\n Cadi\u2019s identification with the Sin Eater soon becomes an obsession: Unable to live with herself, a couple days later she seeks him out. She goes into the mountains to find him, despite others\u2019 warnings.<\/p>\n Here is\u00a0real<\/em>\u00a0heroism: Cadi\u2019s refusal to heed superstitious gossip and deny the evidence of her own experience buttresses her resolve to forge on in her quest. We soon learn her secret\u2014her sister\u2019s accidental death, by falling off a tree bridge over a waterfall\u2014was prompted, partly, by Cadi\u2019s stubbornness. However, her very intransigence is also the key to her eventual redemption.<\/p>\n Around this point, the plot comes to a standstill as it meanders. Unable to take the clumsy dialogue of the three child actors, I get ready to exit the theater. Only one thing keeps me pinned in my seat:\u00a0What will happen next?<\/em><\/p>\n Cadi eventually tracks down the Sin Eater to his secret cave, he reluctantly performs the sin eating rite, never having done it for a living person. She feels nothing, and descends the mountain just as encumbered as she was going up.<\/p>\n On her way home, she happens upon a Man of God (Henry Thomas) alone and preaching the gospel to no one in particular along the river. Seeing that she\u2019s troubled, he gets her to open up about her predicament. He laughs, and divulges to Cadi that the mortal Sin Eater cannot relieve her guilt, that long ago there was a true sin eater named Jesus Christ, whose grace has made it possible for her to be forgiven for her sins while still alive, rather than having to wear them like an albatross around her neck until death.<\/p>\n Suddenly, Cadi feels the weight of the world lifted from her shoulders. She runs to tell everyone. \u201cKnow the truth, and the truth shall set you free.\u201d<\/p>\n But now the\u00a0mystery<\/em>\u00a0has just begun. Why is the immigrant enclave ignorant of this common knowledge of Christ\u2019s salvation? Why must a doomed man endure ostracism, serving a miserable sentence performing atavistic pagan rituals?\u00a0 And why does village bully Brogan Kai (Stewart Finlay-McLennan, whose thuggish performance recalls Ward Bond and George Kennedy) corner the Man of God, killing this \u201coutsider,\u201d lest his words reach the village?<\/p>\n As Cadi hides from Brogan, she returns to the mountain, where we find out the settlers\u2019 real sin, a secret that\u2019s haunted two generations. Cadi tells the Sin Eater the good news, but he\u2019s unable to accept the tragic fate of having been denied the love of the woman he loved, fathering children and a purposeful, fulfilling life for naught. His agony resonates deeply as he begs her off. \u201cIt means I will have wasted twenty years of my life in this cave and never saved a single soul from damnation,\u201d he cries, breaking down.<\/p>\n Being an old-fashioned movie, Louise Fletcher (best known for her Oscar-winning role of sadistic Nurse Ratched in 1975\u2019s\u00a0One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest)<\/em>\u00a0as village elder Miz Elda is the movie\u2019s\u00a0Deux ex machina,<\/em>\u00a0who calls a town meeting that night to divulge the secret. Her testimony opens up a lot of old wounds, but, rather than burning the village to the ground a la avenging angel Clint Eastwood in his 1973 revenge fantasy\u00a0High Plains Drifter<\/em>, Elda\u2019s words instead lift the shadows of superstition and scapegoating that kept them in darkness.<\/p>\n The Sin Eater renounces his dark avocation, becomes a preacher and saves souls instead in the sunlight by the river. The movie closes with Cadi exclaiming its moral, that she\u2019s been set free because Christ died for her sins. Not very subtle, but consider the context and target audience.<\/p>\n But, that audience already\u00a0knows<\/em>\u00a0that bit of information. The moral was a rather ingenious MacGuffin for a life-affirming message that sin is an aberration, not man\u2019s constant state and a this-worldly metaphysics that individuals have the inherent right and dignity to live as\u00a0men, not<\/em>\u00a0objects of sacrifice. In other words, \u201cJesus died for our sins,\u00a0so now we can all get on with the business of living.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Maybe it\u2019s not just the sex, moral decadence and profanity driving the faithful to these new religious pictures. From the looks of this one, maybe it\u2019s not only preaching to the choir, either. Perhaps, just like everyone else staying away in droves from movie theaters nowadays, they too just want to see motion pictures that tell fascinating stories, project a benevolent sense of life and present man as clean, heroic, and productive.<\/p>\n And maybe, just maybe, they\u2019re getting fed-up with being patronized as unsophisticated rubes for wanting everybody to live\u2014horror of horrors\u2014happily ever after.<\/p>\n Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in\u00a0<\/span>Black & White Magazine<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Entrepreneur<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Hoy! New York<\/span><\/span>, the New York\u00a0<\/span>Post<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>RCA Victor\u00a0<\/span>(Japan)<\/span><\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>Scene in San Antonio<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Spirit Magazine<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(Canada),\u00a0<\/span>Top Producer<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0 and the Trenton\u00a0<\/span>Times<\/span><\/span>. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of\u00a0<\/span>The New Individualist<\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 The Importance of Being Earnest \u00a0 [xrr rating=3\/5] The Last Sin Eater.\u00a0Starring Louise Fletcher, Henry Thomas, Soren Fulton, A.J. Buckley, Stewart Finlay-McLennan, Peter Wingfield, Elizabeth Lackey, Thea Rose, Gabrielle Fitzpatrick, and introducing Liana Liberato. Music by Mark McKenzie. Cinematography by Robert Seaman. Screenplay by Brian Bird and Michael Landon, Jr., based on the novel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76,47,35,3,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-movies","category-costume-dramas","category-dramas","category-mreview","category-religious-dramas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":494,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions\/494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}