The Father
****

It is easy to see why Anthony Hopkins was recently awarded this year’s Academy Award for Best Actor. He is magnificent as an old man with a fading memory in this film. The movie is presented in a manner that the viewers experiences the memory lapses and subsequent episodes of confusion as if it were happening to us. Hopkins’ facial expressions, voice, movements, and interactions with the other characters are near perfect. He moves easily between anger and fury to softness and sadness.

The film was written and directed by Florian Zeller who has adapted his prize-winning French play of the same name along with Christopher Hampton. Interestingly, the main character’s first name is “Anthony”. His daughter is played by Olivia Colman who also turned in an outstanding performance. To make things even more interesting, Anthony’s daughter is also played at a different age by Olivia Williams who physically resembles Ms. Coleman. There were several clever manipulations of the setting all adding up to a somewhat unique cinematic experience.

***

Room-nf

You probably have some idea of the plot of this movie as we did when we decided to view it one evening. A young woman is abducted and held hostage in an 11-foot by 11-foot room with only a skylight facing the real world. Her abductor has the code to the steel locked door. He visits her regularly in order to rape her. After about a year, she becomes pregnant and raises her son, Jack, in this confined space. We meet them when Jack is turning five years old. His television set is his only window on the outside but he doesn’t actually believe what he sees on it is “real”. This raises an interesting thought; do we all really know what is out there in the wide universe beyond our experience on our small planet Earth. For all we know, we have a very narrow perspective on “life”. We don’t think this was the overt theme of this film but it may have stimulated more than meets the eye.

More concretely, the movie takes us through the dramatic freeing of mother and child from their prison. We struggle with Jack and his mother as they attempt to reintegrate from this experience. In this regard, We found it incongruous that a mother who is so close to her child due to these circumstances could contemplate abandoning him. So, the story is one that tries to show the “power of guilt”.

The other power of this movie is the Academy Award-winning experience of Brie Larson as the mother and the amazing performance of the very young man, Jacob Tremblay who plays the child.

Thanks to the direction of Lenny Abrahamson and the novel and screenplay by Emma Donoghue, we are treated to a highly unusual story. Despite the great acting and the unusual plot, we felt that the film was lacking in drama and could have used more depth. We are only given a glimpse on the impact on the young woman’s parents played by Joan Allen and William H. Macy who lost their daughter for seven years ago when she was 17 years old. Overall, this movie could have been done better but it will be memorable to all who see it. (2015).

***
Sands of Iwo Jima- nf – I first saw this movie as an 11 or 12 year old boy and the memory of it has vividly stayed with me to the point where I exactly remembered the tragic ending. I could not resist watching it when it was unexpectedly offered to me as I was checking my email and I just happened to have the time to see it. It stars John Wayne who was nominated for an Academy Award for this movie. He plays the tough Marine Sergeant Styrker who has the task of whipping a bunch of recruits in shape to fight the Japanese in World War II. By now so many parts of the storyline can be considered cliché but they were very real when the movie was made and shown just four years after the end of the war. There was the soldier not getting a letter from home, or getting one, the marine who was son of the tough Colonel who had died, the recruit who tried to disguise that he was 17 and lied to get into the Marines, the USO dance when the marines were on leave, accidentally dropping a hand grenade during training and a hero intervening to throw it away, a marine being made to do extra practicing of his bayonet skills, hitting the beaches under attack, being ordered to “ lock and load “ as they got off the landing craft, marines being shot as they charged on the beach, calling for “ Medic” and a Jewish marine reciting the “Shama Yisrael” prayer before he died after being shot, which of course hit home to me. To a young kid of my generation this movie was typical of the war stories with which we identified and wondered how would we have faired if we fought in the Great War. There were no computer-generated images in this black and white movie. There was actual footage of the real assault on Iwo Jima and I read that there 2000 real marines used as extras in the movie. The actual flag raised on Iwo Jima was used in the scene which reenacted the famous raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi which was captured in the iconic photograph by Joe Rosenthal. I also read that two of the marines that were there in the photograph participated in that part of the film. So for me the visit to this film was a great piece of nostalgia and meaningful history. (1949)