*****

Fruitvale Station-sp  This is one of the most realistic, gripping and yet personal  depictions of a tragic event that we have seen in a long time. It is well known to residents of the Bay Area and many other people that a few years ago there was a shooting of a 22 year old black man by the name of Oscar Grant by the BART (transit) police. This event was vividly captured by numerous cell phone videos on that day and was shown in the opening of this movie. Ryan Coogler, a black film student of the same age, was very much impacted by this event, as he felt it could have been him. Nina Yang Bongiovi, movie producing partner of the well known actor/director Forest Whitaker, in their quest to support young filmmakers, connected with Coogler and were impressed by his student work  and his motivation to make this film. Bongiovi in our post screening discussion related how once Coogler was chosen to direct this film, he wrote the screenplay in 4 weeks and along with the producers convinced Michael B. Jordan to play the role of Oscar Grant. Melanie Diaz then signed on to play the girlfriend and veteran actress Octavia Spencer took on the all-important role of the mother. Both were magnificent in their sensitive emotional roles of these devastated women. Jordan who has acknowledged that he also felt quite related to his character handled the multifaceted parts of him quite well. It is the presentation of the persona of Grant that raises this movie to the five star level we believe it deserves. He is shown to be a caring young man who loves his daughter, girl friend and mother and is quite capable of extending his sensitivity to others in many ways. At the same time he is not totally honest with himself or others.  He is troubled, and angry. He has a temper which can lead him to  provoke as well as respond to temptations to fight and lash out. It may be argued that he may have become a symbol of the persistent racial tensions in the Bay Area and now to a worldwide movie audience. However the insight shown into him may also be able to allow both sides of the divide to identify with him and his aspirations which raises the possibility that this understanding will help to defuse these racial tensions which are still with us.  Once the story begins to develop, it  is very fast moving aided by the hand held camera work by Rachel Morrison who brought her reality TV experience to this movie. In the end, the great effort from both sides of the camera gave us a first rate movie that has the potential to make a big difference in how we understand ourselves and others. (2013)

****

42 rm- When a  movie can tell the story of an important 20^th century historical event, gets it right with the subject being our national pastime, baseball, and racial prejudice, it has achieved an extra base hit. If that movie can appeal to youngsters from pre-teens upwards and can push all the buttons of baseball fans who lived (one of us in Brooklyn) through the time frame of this story, it has hit a homerun. After experiencing this film with our two grandchildren we certainly felt that way. Jackie Robinson was chosen by Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1947 to become the first black baseball player in the major leagues. This film traces Rickey’s decision and Robinson’s journey out of the all black baseball league, first to the Montreal Royals, the Dodger’s premier farm club, then to the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Major Leagues. The film portrays racial slurs, threats, bean balls to the head, being refused check-in at hotels, mixed reaction from the Dodger teammates who included Dixie Walker, Pee Wee Reese, Ralph Branca, Gene Hermansky and  Eddie Stankey. It showed tough manager Leo Durocher (Christopher Meloni) who got thrown off the team for an extramarital affair with actress Lorraine Day and kindly manager Burt Shotten (Max Gail) who wore street clothes whila managing because he promised his wife he would never put on another baseball uniform after he retired. Director and screenplay writer Brian Heigeland (who previously wrote Mystic River and won an Academy Award for his adaptation of LA Confidential) apparently got his love of Brooklyn and the history of the Dodgers from his dad. Once he got interested in this story he won the rights and the blessing of Robinson’s widow Rachel. He went out of his way to bring authenticity to the story and chose his baseball scenes from the actual box scores. Adding Brooklyn sportscaster Red Barber’s (John McGinley) play by play was a good touch. Relative newcomer Chadwick Boseman did an excellent job as Robinson, as did Nicole Beharie as Rachel. Their chemistry was wonderful and apparently was very moving to the real Rachel. However, if anybody other than Jackie Robinson was stealing anything other than  second base it may have been Harrison Ford as Dodger GM Branch Rickey stealing the movie. His cigar chewing inflections, his determination and the glint in his eye must have channeled the real Rickey and certainly brought his spirit to the film. It may even bring an Oscar statue to Mr Ford. Of course the star is Jackie Robinson and this film will certainly allow him and his legacy to live on  for future generations- a most worthwhile outcome.(2013)

***

Midnight’s Children-sp This is a film adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s award winning 1981 novel which he himself slimmed down to a 130 page screenplay from his 600 page tome. Director Deepta Mehta then squeezed it into a 2 hour and 20 minute movie. The film follows children born on August 15, 1947 when colonial India was bifurcated into India and Pakistan. The main character is one of these children, Saleem, who is played as an adult by Satya Bhabba. Most of the other children are apparitions in his head which keep reappearing throughout the film. These children have all kinds of special powers and appear to be an allegory for the wishful thinking of the people who experienced terrible conflicts that have happened between India and Pakistan, East Pakistan and West Pakistan, Kashmir, and probably many other horrific wars that dominated the sub-continent during the past century. The story also uses the fascinating gambit of two children being switched at birth and challenges us with the idea of what would have happened if a child of privileged parents was raised by a poor family and vice versa. When you think of this part of the world you probably envision beautiful unsurpassed countryside, large mansions, women in flowing dresses as well as people living in close quarters in teaming slums. This film is filled with all these images and the cinematography was magnificent and creative. Most of it was handheld with credit going to Director of Photography Giles Nuttgens. Despite it’s unusual length, we found that we stayed engaged with the film. As much as we enjoyed the images, the action and the character interaction, we felt at a disadvantage as we struggled with trying to recall and place in historical context what we were seeing on the screen. This became heightened by the fact that we were periodically introduced to the “magical realism” going on in the head of the main character. We do imagine that the film will do very well in India and Pakistan. It was interesting to learn that there were concerns about threatened protests from the fundamentalist Hindus in India and the fundamentalist Moslems in Pakistan for the depiction of their people or from political supporters of the legacy of Indira Ghandi for the violent destruction of slum areas that were shown. All never materialized. What did appear is a unique epic film that may very well have captured the essence of this time and place.(2013)      

****

No Place on Earth – sp Just as you think that you have seen every type of Holocaust film, a movie such as this one comes along. It not only tells the story of the survival of a group of Ukrainian Jews who hid for 511 days in the world’s deepest caves in the Ukraine but it will push all your buttons when several of them, including a 91 year old energetic gentleman, return with their grandchildren 67 years later to visit the their old, darkened, dingy home which in some places was over 50 feet underground. Film maker Janet Tobias, who has been a producer for 60 Minutes and Prime Time Live, learned about this story when a colleague showed her a National Geographic article that Chris Nicola, a New York State Investigator who has a serious hobby of exploring caves all over the world, had written. Nicola, during one of his vacations, explored this unusual deep gypsum cave in the Ukraine and came across some human artifacts, which included a shoe, a cup, and some buttons. He returned to the area for the next couple of years asking the local people if they knew about where they had come from. Most did not, but one person said it might have something to do with the Jews. Nicola embedded key words in his web sites meant to attract people searching for their genealogy related to the Holocaust and these specific caves.. This ultimately led him to make connections with the actual survivors, most of who were living in Canada. This included Esther Stermer who wrote a book about her experience titled “We Fight to Survive” She said she wrote this book so her grandchildren would know about what they had been through during World war II. Little did she know, thanks to Ms. Tobias and this film, she would actually accompany her grandchildren back to this hidden cave and watch her granddaughter descend into the deepest depths to visit this special place in her family history. This film is actually a modified docu-drama. Part of the film includes getting know several of the survivors as they narrate the film in an articulate at times emotional manner giving us a feel for their fortitude, determination and even their sense of humor. We see how the decision is made by the family matriarch to pack up as much of their belongings as possible and flee to avoid deportation (which would have ultimately led to their extermination). We feel the experience through the eyes of a 70-year-old woman as a 4 and 5 year old. Interspersed with this narration, we witness a reenactment by Hungarian/Ukrainian actors, adults and children as they crawl through barely lit crevices and help us understand what it was like to live there, interacting with each other and risking their lives to bring food to their hiding places. There is one close call after another along with heroism, good luck but most of all the will to live. This combination of a documentary with actual actors was quite an accomplishment to effectively pull off. We knew the people narrating the story survived, but we were still on the edge of our seats. We didn’t quite anticipate the emotional reaction we would have when we saw this band of elderly people return to these caves with their families and could show their grandchildren a place that was truly like no place on earth and their most remarkable survival experience. (2013)

Postscript:  If you are interested in some of the untold stories of survivors of the Holocaust I recommend that you consider reading a remarkable  book which I reviewed about a year ago in my Psychiatry Blog as well as in BookRap.net

****

Emperor –sp  If you are a student or a fan of WW II history or are old enough to have some memories of the first 20 or so post war years, you may have wondered why the Japanese Emperor Hirohito  wasn’t punished for war crimes? Well, he wasn’t and in fact was allowed to continue to be the revered reigning monarch until his death in 1989 while his war time prime minister Tojo and other military leaders were executed by the victorious Americans. This is the main focus of this movie, directed by Peter Webber, starring Matthew Fox as Bonner Fellers the American Brigadier General tasked with deciding whether to put Hirohito on trial and perhaps hang him and Tommy Lee Jones as his boss, General Douglas Mac Arthur, along with some of today’s leading Japanese actors. The script by David Klass and Vera Blasi has taken some known historical facts and also weaved and constructed a love story between General Fellers and a young Japanese woman he met in college in the U.S. before the war, effectively using flashback techniques. The result is a fascinating if not gripping story, which might color our view of this piece of WWII history. We see a Japanese leader remind General Fellers that history is filled with terrible deeds during war including those done by the British or even the Americans although he acknowledges the Japanese “ lost their humanity in WW II. ” Through the tender love story and empathy that General Fellers has for the Japanese people we are led to consider that the Japanese at this point in history were not as bad as they have been depicted to most of us. Perhaps Hirohito didn’t really favor the war in the first place and didn’t know about all the atrocities . Also, apparently it was his request to the Japanese people, despite the resistance of his military leaders, that led to a peaceful surrender (after the dropping of the atomic bomb) which saved 100,000s of American lives which would have been lost if we had to invade the Japanese islands. We disagreed on whether this was an overtly sympathetic point of view (of a culture that still doesn’t teach the history of WW II to school children) or it was simply shinning a light on a piece of little known history. We do agree it was an outstanding film, worth seeing. (2013)

***

War Witch sp – We saw this  Oscar nominated movie for best foreign film a few days before the Academy Award ceremony. It is the Canadian entry since that is the home country of Director Kim Nguyen who also wrote the screenplay which he told our screening audience in a post film interview that he has been writing on and off for 10 years. It is set somewhere in the African Congo where a rebel army abducts children and makes them soldiers. The movie, which was primarily filmed in the  Democratic Republic of the Congo, appears to be quite authentic. It  follows Komono, a  12 year old girl, for two years, starting with the point where she is captured, made to shoot her parents and become a soldier. Circumstances lead her captors to believe that she has special powers, can see things that are going to happen and therefore protect them. She is played by a first time local actress Rachel Mwanza, who actually grew up in the streets without a family and was chosen by Kim Nguyen after auditioning over 2000 young girls.  She is on the screen just about all the time and expresses clearly her inner pain and emotions  well as her  own thoughts and images with a little help from the visual effects of the film and the voiceover  in French by another actress (with English subtitles of course). It also has a great soundtrack of  what appeared to be African folk music which captured the atmosphere and mood  of the film. Mwanza for her first film has already won the the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this month and also won the award for the Best Actress in the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. In the film she is accompanied most of the time by another child soldier who is an Albino known as the Magician, also very well  played by a local actor Serge Kanyinda. This movie presents us with a glimpse at a lesser known atrocity  which has occurred in modern times. It is also a simple and beautiful, if not,  sad love story . It well deserves the recognition which it is receiving. (2012)

****

No- sp

This Chilean movie was one of 90 foreign films  submitted by various countries as an entry for an Academy Award. It is the first film from Chile to become one of the five  finalist for an Oscar in this category which will be awarded in about one month from the date that this review is being written. This is the second film directed by Pablo Larrain to be entered by Chile for an Academy Award. The other film was Tony Mannero in 2008.  No is a dramatization of a very important event that happened Chile 1988 , about which we would guess most Americans might only have the vaguest notion. That was the plebiscite in which the Chilean people were given the opportunity, because of international pressure put on long term President and dictator Augusto Pinochet, to vote whether they wanted him to continue for another 8 years. Pinochet had been an army general who was part of the coup d’etat that had overthrown the government of Salvadore Allende in 1973 and subsequently ruled the country as an appointed dictator President. His government was known for killing, interning and torturing thousands of Chilean citizens who resisted his rule. Therefore it was a big event when this election, which was under international scrutiny, was scheduled to take place where a yes or no vote would determine whether Pinochet would stay in place. The story line follows Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal) who is a skilled advertising executive who becomes one of the masterminds behind the “ No “ campaign. Each side is given 15 minutes per day on television to make its case  and the actual 1980s commercials  from each side which were shown in that  election were used in the film. In fact 1/3 of the movie is actual archival tapes which is weaved into the scripted segments. This probably included some of the brutal street scenes where Pinochet’s thugs and police were roughing up protesters. 1980 cameras were used to shoot the movie to capture the texture of the times. The movie showed  the anxiety, drama and fear of the NO advertising team as they made their decision to emphasize what they thought would be a new day for Chile (with song and dance) as compared to all out attack on the existing government (although they did some of that also). On one hand this was an exciting battle with a dramatic ending but it also highlighted the subtle emotions with which these people struggled. We learned that many of the small but powerful  roles of the characters on both sides of this struggle were played by the actual people who had been part of the No supporters  25 years ago . This gave our movie experience an added touch of authenticity. (2012)

****

Zero Dark Thirty

The last time Director Katherine Bigelow and Screenwriter Mark Boal collaborated they made the Hurt Locker which was one of the finest war  films we have ever seen. Since the subject matter this time was the story of the tracking down and killing of Osama ben Laden, it seemed like a natural for them to duplicate their great work.  They ended up doing a very good  job but in our opinion it wasn’t a “repeat”. They initially tug on our emotions by starting the film with frantic phone calls coming from the doomed World Trade Center on 9/11. We then are exposed to the United States  waterboarding suspects who might lead us to Osama ben Laden. This element while uncomfortable to watch, may not be telling the complete story in regard to how key this was to what was to come. The film centers around Maya (Jessica Chastain) a CIA agent who doggedly persists when all the other CIA honchos have their doubts including Leon Panetta CIA director (James Gandelfini)  We are told in the credits that she is a real person who can’t be identified since she is still an active agent. It is too bad that we couldn’t know anything substantial about her other than to watch her determination  despite no one believing her. Nevertheless Ms Chastain carries the film with her riveting portrayal of this American heroine. There also was a great deal of mumbo jumbo on the radio, agents talking back and forth, numerous Arab names mentioned as suspects or people who might have known people. You were never really given enough information to appreciate who they were and what role they played. We also never really get to know the numerous CIA agents, Bureau Chiefs, operatives or whatever. Even the Navy Seal team stays a team and they all blend together in their military fatigues and being viewed through night vision goggles. We will admit that the 2 hours and 40 minutes did go by quite quickly and it was exciting to watch the attack on the compound. It was quite authentic and you felt and thought you were there.  If the real Maya ever writes a memoir, we will be sure to read it and get to know what she was really like and how she brought about the slaying of this dragon. (2012)

***

The Deep- sp

It is easy to see why this movie is  currently the  #1 film in Iceland and is that country’s entry for the best foreign film. It is a fairly authentic depiction of the frigid North Atlantic Ocean and a man’s survival in it for 6 freezing hours. This true story is well known to inhabitants of this country and especially  those from the off shore island from where this  ill fated fishing trawler departed. It is here that we meet the small crew the night before as they get ready to leave their friends, families and, for some, the usual night out on the town. The viewer is lulled into the boring routine of another fishing excursion in the brutal cold water trawling the nets for fish. Without warning we are thrown into the water with Gulli (Olafur Darri Olafsson) as he creates with the help of director Baltasar Kormakur the journey which defied medical science. Kormakur did not have CGI effects or a large bathtub to film this picture and actually used the real sea, huge waves and all. Credit should go to this team for the realism which they achieved (even though we felt that it  looked like the hero  was treading water most of the time rather than swimming a distance which was documented  (although his rescuers and doctors said they could  not believe was true.) Nevertheless, the overall effect was quite dramatic and knowing that it was a true story, we shared the awe that the doctors had after extensively examining this man after this feat. ( 2012)

*****

Lincoln -rm                                                          

The problem with any movie that gets a lot of hype because it is about two giants in in their respective spheres of influence, Lincoln and Spielberg, is that you expect to be blown away, enthralled , introduced to new ideas that you never thought about before etc. etc.  What we have here is a good movie, a really good movie that provides insight into one of the greatest American Presidents, as well as a lesson in political history that brought about one of the most important pieces of our constitutional history, the 13^th Amendment that prohibits slavery. However, in order to appreciate this movie, you have to do more than sit back and enjoy, you really have to concentrate and think about what is going on before you. You are skillfully helped in this task by the screenplay by Tony Kushner based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book “ Team of Rivals”, superb acting especially by Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln , Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln and, of course, the brilliant directing of Steven Spielberg.

The portrayal of Lincoln is distinctive and consistent. We have no way of knowing how on the mark it was, but his thoughtful, intense caring persona yet with a  sense of humor makes him appear to be a  person we would like to think that he was. He also was shown to be struggling with a parental dilemma with which we can  easily identify. Imagine if you had a son that wanted to enlist in the military where young soldiers were dying by the thousands. Would you do everything you could to stop him ( and what if you could, since you were the Commander in Chief?). Or, if you understood how he could never forgive himself if he didn’t enlist would you allow him to choose his destiny (despite the protests of your wife). This was just a small side theme of this movie.

Thaddeus Stevens, one of the Republican leaders in the House of Representatives, appears to be a fascinating person, as dedicated as Lincoln to their common cause but quite feisty with a sharp tongue that he wasn’t afraid to use. One of us was moved to read a little bit more about this man who was shown in the film as having a secret that was actually true to life.

The potential pertinence of this film to our modern day political issues was quite apparent. We know that there is a great deal of wheeling and dealing behind the scenes and the cynical among us would say that most politicians can bought if you find the right price. But what if in the end, the goal in this case a constitutional amendment, was actually priceless in human terms. What do you bargain away to get it? It left much to think about regarding compromise and it’s many layers, as well as stopping ”perfect from being the enemy of the good.”

Then there is the “Rocky Factor”. Whenever there is a situation where a good guy has an uphill battle, can the movie send a chill up your spine at the right time. This one did. (2012)