Selma

Posted on December 24, 2014 at 5:55 pm

A+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Preschool
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for disturbing thematic material including violence, a suggestive moment, and brief strong language
Profanity:	Some strong and racist language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Some drinking and smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Very brutal violence including abuse and beatings by law enforcement and individuals, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	December 25, 2014
Date Released to DVD:	May 4, 2015
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00S1MYWBW

“Selma,” director Ava DuVernay’s film about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the march from Selma, Alabama to the state capital at Montgomery, to make the case for the right to vote, is superb as biography, as history, and as drama. It is one of the best movies of this year and this decade.

And somehow it has arrived just as we need it most, as Americans continue to struggle to reconcile our notions of equality. This film is a powerful reminder of the Civil Rights Movement cry that “we’re not where we want to be, we’re not where we’re going to be, but, thank God, we’re not where we were.” It is a reminder of the difference one person can make, and the inescapability of an idea whose time has come. And it should also be a powerful reminder that the voting rights people fought — and died — must be exercised to carry that dream forward.

This is a story of politics and race and history, but it is also very much the story of a man who just wanted to be “a pastor in a small college town” but found himself called to lead a movement, even though he put himself, his followers, and his family at risk. King has to try to keep his supporters together, increasingly difficult as the very progress he has made has made them impatient and independent.

British actor David Oyelowo makes Dr. King into a real person, polite and respectful but also canny and insistent in his meetings with President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) in the Oval Office, devoted and compassionate with the members of the movement, stirring and inspirational at the pulpit and podium, and at his most vulnerable when he is alone with his wife, Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo, who played the same role in the superb “Boycott”). Even over the course of the few weeks covered by this film, we see Dr. King constantly assessing, re-evaluating, learning, and growing.

We also see that wiliest of politicians, LBJ, outmaneuvered by King, partly because he refused to give up but also because for the first time there was television coverage of what was going on and the rest of the country, 70 million viewers, were no longer able to pretend that this country was living up to its ideals of justice and equality. Even with the passage of the monumental Civil Rights Act, which required equal treatment without regard to race or gender in public accommodations and the workplace, the inability to vote imposed an insurmountable barrier to meaningful change. At the beginning of the film, we see Annie Lee Cooper carefully, deliberately filling in her application to register to vote. When the contemptuous official quizzes her on the number of county judges in the state, she is prepared with the answer. Clearly, she has tried this before and done her homework. She gives the correct number: 67. He responds, “Name them.”

“This voting thing is just going to have to wait,” Johnson explains. “You have one problem. I have a hundred and one.” He tries to persuade King that his War on Poverty is of central importance to black citizens. King understood that without the right to vote, blacks would continue to be excluded.

Everyone tries to stop him. The FBI sends tapes to Mrs. King that purport to reveal King’s affairs. There are constant threats and supporters are murdered. A church is bombed, killing Four Little Girls. The first time they try to walk to Montgomery, the 600 marchers are attacked by the police with tear gas and billy clubs wrapped in barbed wire.

But television cameras send pictures of the police brutality to 70 million viewers across the country. The images put even more pressure on Johnson, who finally brings Governor George Wallace (Tim Roth) to the Oval Office, to force some progress on the man whose inaugural address included the words, “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Today we live in a world that is saturated in images and opinions, often angry ones. This film, like King’s patient but insistent voice, is a clarion call, the story of a man, a movement, and a journey that can and must continue.

Parents should know that the movie’s themes include historic depiction of virulent racism including verbal and physical attacks and murder, strong language including racist epithets, brief sexual sounds and discussion of affairs.

Family Discussion: How did Dr. King make President Johnson change his mind? How did President Johnson make George Wallace change his mind?

If you like this, try: Other films about the Civil Rights movement including “Boycott” (also featuring Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King), “Separate But Equal,” and “Eyes on the Prize”

Unbroken

Posted on December 24, 2014 at 5:49 pm

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Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for war violence including intense sequences of brutality, and for brief language
Profanity:	Some strong and offensive/abusive language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense wartime peril and violence, characters injured, abused, and killed, some disturbing images, parent strikes a child with a belt
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	December 25, 2014
Date Released to DVD:	March 23, 2015
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00HLTDC9O

Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie breaks into the top ranks of American directors with “Unbroken,” showing an exceptional understanding not just of actors, but of tone, scale, and letting the camera tell the story. Working with the magnificent cinematography of Roger Deakins (“True Grit,” “Skyfall”), she adopts a classical style well-suited to the WWII setting, but every choice is careful, thoughtful, and powerful.

Based on the best-seller by Laura Hillenbrand, this is the story of Louis Zamperini, the son of Italian immigrants. He was a rebellious kid who became an Olympic athlete. His bomber plane crashed over the Pacific, and he survived for 47 days at sea, before being captured with one surviving crewmate, by the Japanese. In the prison camp, he was singled out for horrific abuse and repeatedly beaten.

The screenplay by the famously off-beat Joel and Ethan Coen is straightforward, direct, and sincere, keeping the focus on the war years, with the incidents from Zamperini’s past brought it primarily to show us how he relies on his memories to keep going. “Nobody’s chasing me,” he tells his brother who is urging him to run faster as he trains for a race. “I’m chasing you,” his brother tells him.

That internalized sense of mission helps him hold onto the idea of his own power as the brutal Japanese captors try to take everything away from him.

The opening scene puts us in the sky, and Jolie superbly evokes the thrill and the terror of flying on a bombing mission in aircraft that seem barely past the era of the Wright brothers. The crash scene is vertiginously disorienting. Jack O’Connell plays Zamperini with an effortless masculinity, understanding that it has nothing to do with macho posturing, just an imperishable sense of integrity, courage, and honor. O’Connell, Finn Witrock (“Noah”), and Domhnall Gleeson (“About Time”) perfectly capture the rhythms of an experienced crew, some amiable wisecracks and bravado to recognize the perilousness of their situation, but always focused, on task, and always, always, putting the team first.

We become so attached that it is sharply painful to see the characters experience such deprivation and abusive treatment. Japanese pop star Miyavi (real name Takamasa Ishihara) plays the sadistic Mutsushiro Watanabe, known as Bird. He knows of Zamperini’s celebrity as an athlete and sees that he is a symbol to the other prisoners.

If the Bird can break Zamperini, it will crush the morale of the whole camp. So, he singles Zamperini out for beatings and mind games. But Zamperini knows that “we beat them by making it to the end of the war alive.” He simply will not give up, and defining his own sense of what it means to win allows him to maintain a sense of control that is his most powerful weapon.

It is gorgeously filmed, superbly acted, and directed with great sensitivity and compassion, but the real impact of the film comes at the end, when we learn through a few simple titles, what happened to Zamperini after the war. Even Jolie recognizes that there is nothing she can put on screen to match the real-life footage of Zamperini, back in Japan at four days before his 81st birthday, running with the Olympic torch.

Parents should know that this movie includes very intense and disturbing wartime peril and violence, with a plane crash, an extended period lost at sea, and grueling prison camp abuse, and some strong language including racist epithets. School-age bullies harass and punch a character and a parent beats a child with a belt.

Family Discussion: What was the toughest challenge for Louis? Why didn’t he give up? Why did he forgive his captors?

If you like this, try: the book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, and Zamperini’s own book, Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In: Lessons from an Extraordinary Life, along with the films Stalag 17 and The Great Escape, also based on real-life WWII stories of American prisoners of war.

Big Eyes

Posted on December 24, 2014 at 5:14 pm

In Woody Allen’s 1973 film “Sleeper,” set in a decadent future, Diane Keaton plays a superficial socialite who tries to think of the highest compliment she can give to an amateurish painting. “Oh, it’s Keane! It’s pure Keane!” she exclaims. Audiences of that time would recognize that reference to Walter Keane, responsible for the wildly if inexplicably popular “big eyes” paintings of sad-looking waifs. When the concept of “kitsch” (cheap, popular, low-brow, and corny “art”) first came to the United States in the 1970’s, the Keane images were often used as an example.

Note that word “responsible.” Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz) was “responsible” for the success of the paintings but he was not responsible for producing them. It was revealed in a dramatic trial that while Walter Keane claimed credit as the sole artist behind the paintings (and prints and books), he had never put a brush to canvas. Every one of the paintings was created by the only artist in the family, his wife, Margaret (Amy Adams).

Director Tim Burton, whose film about notoriously awful movie director Ed Wood is one of his best, has created another very good film about very bad art. Like that film, “Big Eyes” is highly stylized, with heightened period detail exaggerated to reflect and comment on the art that it depicts. At one point, in some distress, Margaret pushes a shopping cart through a grocery story, seeing the big eyes in the faces of everyone she looks at.

This film also draws on the 60’s era beginning stages of the women’s movement to anchor the story. Margaret took her daughter and left her first husband at a time when most middle class women were expected to stay home and defer to their husbands. She arrived in San Francisco at the dawn of the “consciousness raising” era, at the epicenter of movements advocating more focus on individual needs and personal fulfillment. But Margaret still thought of herself as powerless in her relationship with Walter, in part because it was her nature and the way she was raised to defer and get along, partly because she was dependant on him. She married him in a hurry because her ex-husband was threatening to sue her for custody at a time when single mothers who left their husbands and had to find jobs had very few rights. “I’m a divorcee with a child,” she tells a friend. “Walter is a blessing.”

It was also partly because she loved him, at first.

Margaret was pretty good at painting the pictures, but Walter was undeniably a world-class genius at selling them. He was very good at marketing up: he sold to movie stars and appeared as a guest on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He got a commission for a mural at the World’s Fair. And he was even better at marketing down. When he noticed that people who could not afford the paintings were taking home posters from the gallery, he realized that there was an opportunity there. “Would you rather sell one $500 painting or a million crappy reproduced posters?” Pretty soon there were Keane images for every budget, with the originals in an art gallery and the copies in stores, alongside kitchen utensils and t-shirts.

Margaret signed her work “Keane,” and Walter slipped easily into taking credit for it. He told Margaret (correctly) that no one took women artists seriously and that (also correct) that he was willing to do the kind of glad-handing and public appearances that she is not. So, she stays locked in her studio painting all the time, increasingly isolated, finally even from her own sense of who she is.

The eerie look in the big eyes of the children in the paintings begins to seem haunting. Margaret realizes that she has to leave another husband. And she has to tell the truth.

Tim Burton has a story with the grotesquerie built in, not just the outlandish images but the turbulence of the era. Waltz has the showier role and delivers as a man whose ebullience mutates into a grandiosity from which there was no return. Adams, as the woman whose passion for expression grows — finally — into the ability to speak for herself with her voice as well as her brush.

Parents should know that this film includes some disturbing themes including emotional abuse, broken marriages, fraud, some sexual references, and brief strong language.

Family Discussion: Who was responsible for the success of the big eye paintings? Why did Walter lie and why did Margaret let him?

If you like this, try: “Ed Wood” from the same director

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Based on a true story Drama

Pride

Posted on December 22, 2014 at 6:00 am

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Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language and brief sexual content
Profanity:	Very strong language, some crude
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Some peril and violence, bullying and harassment
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	October 9, 2014
Date Released to DVD:	December 22, 2014
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00OY7YNKI

The ingredients for this film were so irresistible that it is a unexpected bonus to find that it is so much better than it needed to be.

It’s based on a true story of extraordinary kindness, generosity, and friendship and it stars a bunch of adorable English actors (Imelda Staunton, Bill Nighy) who could read the tax code out loud and make it cuddly and uplifting. But it is also very smart, very touching, and very timely, and one of the best films of the year.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher imposed a system of market-based economic changes that created massive upheavals, depicted in films like “Billy Elliot,” “Brassed Off,” and “The Full Monty.” The miners were on strike from 1984-85 after the Thatcher government announced that it was shutting down many of the coal mines, and it was a bitter, angry time.

It was also the early stages of gay pride. And one young activist, Mark Ashton (the enormously charismatic Ben Schnetzer) sees a connection between gay pride and the miners. They have a common enemy. He sets up something called Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, and gets a couple of friends to join him in collecting money to help the miners on strike.

But most of the miners groups turn him down. Only one responds, a group in Wales. Their leader Dai (Paddy Considine) comes to London to pick up the money LGSM has raised, and his thanks is genuine and very moving. “When you’re in a battle against an enemy so much bigger and stronger than you, to find out you had a friend you never knew existed, well, that’s the best feeling in the world.”

They invite the LGSM to visit, and the welcome ranges from warm to a bit stiff and uncomfortable, except for one woman who calls them perverts and tries to get them thrown out. As one might predict, there are scenes of gay men dancing and cute country folk asking questions (“Is it true that all lesbians are vegetarian? I heard that at the covered market!”). And one of the local guys sheepishly asks one of the London gay men for a dance lesson to impress a girl. There’s also a guy who’s not out to his family. And, as time passes, the spectre of a far worse scourge than Thatcher will shift the focus of the gay pride movement to AIDS.

But for a brief moment, there was a connection that grew from a common threat to a unity of purpose to understanding and real friendship. The final section is a reminder of how much difference we can make and how much that difference is needed.

Parents should know that this film has some mature themes and strong languages. Characters drink and smoke and there is some peril and violence.

Family discussion: What did the gays and the miners have in common? What groups seeking dignity and justice can you help?

If you like this, try: “The Full Monty,” “Brassed Off,” and “Billy Elliot.”

Wild

Posted on December 4, 2014 at 5:58 pm

“If your Nerve, deny you—
Go above your Nerve—”

Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) adds the name of the author, Emily Dickinson, to the quote she has inscribed in a journal for hikers kept at her entry point on the Pacific Coast Trail. And then she adds her own name as well. It is her own name in a very real sense as she was not born with it and it was not her husband’s name. It was a name she chose from a dictionary at the end of her marriage as the name she wanted to go on with, a name for going above her nerve.

Strayed was lost. Her mother Bobbi (a glowing Laura Dern), the “great love of (her) life,” died of cancer. Her husband Paul (“Newsroom’s” Thomas Sadoski) was loving and supportive but Strayed fell into a self-destructive death spiral, obliterating herself through “detached” sex with strangers and substance abuse that ultimately included shooting heroin. She and Paul recognized their divorce with matching tattoos to keep some part of the idea of permanence connecting them. And then, with nowhere else to go, she decided to take a walk, more than a thousand miles. It was a chance to reconnect with something she knew she loved to do and to get away from the bad choices she was making. The Chinese proverb says that the longest journey begins with a single step. Strayed wanted to take those steps between her old life and whatever was ahead, to begin to feel an un-obliterated life.

Her 60 pounds of equipment filled a backpack called The Monster. She did not practice putting up her tent or using her stove before she left. She was scared, and soon she was also hungry. She had brought the wrong fuel for her stove. A burly farmer driving a tractor gruffly agreed to give her a ride to some food, and then told her he was bringing her back to his house. She looked at him, trying to figure out if he was planning to attack her, hoping he was not. He was not. The farmer and his wife were kind and generous with her. She got the right fuel, and, a few stops later got some advice about getting rid of some of her load, down to burning each night the book pages she had finished reading. Plus, she didn’t really need all those condoms, did she?

Strayed’s book became an international-bestseller, so poetic and inspirational Oprah rebooted her Book Club to endorse it. Like other memoirs combining real and spiritual/emotional journeys, what makes it work is the narrator’s voice. This is as much an internal story as an external one. Screenwriter Nick Hornby (“High Fidelity”) and director Jean-Marc Vallée (“Dallas Buyer’s Club”) understand that this is not a travelogue, though there is some stunning scenery. It is about Strayed thinking back through her chaotic, messy life through the experience of putting one foot in front of the other on her way to a place called The Bridge of the Gods. As she thinks back on her life, we begin to understand the context for this trek at the same time that she does. As we expect from Hornby, there are some great song choices, too.

Strayed’s adventures and encounters along the way resonate with her memories. The farmer is not the only potential danger. The film understatedly but clearly shows how any woman in any sort of wild has to constantly calculate the threat level of the men she encounters. And, in a scene where Strayed comes across another hiker taking a bath in a lake, we get something we rarely see in films, a woman appraising, or maybe just appreciating, a male body. This is a character moment for Strayed, who as we see, has been too impulsive in sexual encounters. But here, she stands back and just savors the moment on its own, owning it without having to do anything about it. “I’m lonelier in my real life than I am out here,” she says.

Feeling your feelings can be painful. Strayed loses toenails and, at one point, her shoes. There are angry, raw patches of skin where The Monster digs into her. She thinks through painful memories of her mother’s illness, her father’s abuse. She remembers being inconsiderate of her mother, a woman who was thrilled to get a chance to go back to school, to think and question and learn. And for the first time, she begins to understand what her mother said about putting yourself in the line of beauty. Just because some things are terrible doesn’t mean everything is. “This has the power to fill you up again if you let it,” someone tells her.

Witherspoon gives a performance of quiet vulnerability and courage. In some ways, as producer as well as star, this was as daunting an undertaking for her as the hike was for Strayed. There was a real risk of making it a glamorized, soapy star vehicle. But as producer and actor, she gives this story the film it deserves.

Parents should know that this film includes explicit sexual references and situations and nudity, substance abuse, references to domestic abuse, and very strong language.

Family discussion: What do you think the quote means and why did Strayed use it to begin her hike? What does it mean to say that wounds come from the same source as power?

If you like this try: Strayed’s books, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Torch, and Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, and another 2014 film about a real-life woman on a long, long walk, Tracks.