Bryan Cranston plays Dalton Trumbo, the brilliant screenwriter whose experiences during the McCarthy era inspired some of the greatest movies ever made about freedom. Trumbo was blacklisted but continued to write screenplays by having them attributed to “fronts,” men who were hired to take credit for them. During this period, two of his fronts were awarded Oscars, which were later re-presented to the man who was truly responsible for them.
Rated R for language throughout, strong sexuality/nudity, violence, and drug use
Profanity:
Constant very strong and crude language, racist and homophobic terms
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Drinking, drugs, drug dealing
Violence/ Scariness:
Violence including guns, fights, riots, sad deaths
Diversity Issues:
A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:
August 14, 2015
Date Released to DVD:
January 18, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:
B013P0X16Q
Copyright 2015 Universal“What does NWA stand for?” asks Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti), who is offering to become the manager of a new rap group from the Compton area of Los Angeles. “No Whites Allowed?”
“No,” Eric “Eazy-E” Wright answers: “N**** Wit Attitude.”
NWA liked to think of itself as speaking truth to power, a CNN of oppressed minorities. When the Detroit police force told them that they would be arrested for obscenity and inciting violence if they performed their notorious “F*** the Police” in concert, they performed it. And they were arrested. When they were accused of glamorizing drugs and violence, they said they were journalists, reporting what they saw. They had a lot of attitude, a lot of anger, and a lot of ambition. They were savvy about what we might call branding. When their song “F*** the Police” got them a warning letter from the FBI, Eazy understood that it was the best possible publicity to present them as rebels being attacked by the Man, marketing money could not buy.
Much of the story is familiar from every other musical biopic you’ve ever seen plus every single episode of “VH1: Behind the Music.” 1. Talented young people from a marginalized community are told that their music is neither good nor commercial. “If you find the next Bon Jovi, call me,” says one label executive as he walks out of their performance. 2. And then they find their audience. They become successful beyond their wildest dreams. 3. And then they discover that fame and money present their own challenges, including fights over money and the direction of the business. But this biopic, produced by the original members of NWA is unexpectedly sweet, even tender, presented with affection and perspective. (Perhaps this is the reason the film omits the genre’s most frequent cliche, the scenes of family members complaining that the musical superstars are not spending enough time at home.)
The script is sharp, often funny, and compelling. When a kid on a school bus taunts a thug in a nearby car, the thug boards the bus at gunpoint to tell the kids to treat him with respect — and stay in school. “We just got a motivational speech from an OG ,” says O’Shea Jackson, soon to be Ice Cube.
It has one of the best ensemble casts of the year and all of the performances are superb. But a considerable percentage of the movie’s power comes from its timing. While the events it depicts occurred three decades ago, it could easily be referring to the current headlines about police abuse and the virulent persistence of racism throughout American society. The footage of Rodney King being brutally attacked is chilling because it shows us where NWA’s anger came from and reminds us of how little progress we have made. More chilling than the attitude from NWA is the way that the constant trauma from the community and the society around it have created a particular kind of ambition. This first generation born after the heyday of the Civil Rights movement does not want promises or the traditional idea of progress. They are not about passive resistance and sit-ins. They are not looking for a seat at a segregated lunch counter. They want to tell their stories. And their contempt for the system is so deep that they show no interest in activism or putting their money back into the community.
Jason Mitchell gives a star-making performance as Eazy-E, the fearless and canny co-founder of NWA who started Ruthless Records with money he made dealing drugs. O’Shea Jackson, Jr. plays his real-life father, better known as Ice Cube, who created the lyrics for many of the group’s biggest and most influential pieces. And Corey Hawkins is Dr. Dre, master of the turntable. The movie is well over two hours and never seems long, but with that running time there should have been space for more about the creative drive. We see the guys writing in notebooks and there is a funny scene with Eazy as a last-minute substitute Dre has to show how to get on beat for their first recording. But we never get a sense of what it feels like to create these songs or to perform them before thousands of fans or how they felt about the complaints that their lyrics were misogynistic. Later we glimpse Ice Cube working on the screenplay for “Friday,” the first film from this movie’s director, F. Gary Gray. But we do not learn that it would be even more influential in Hollywood than NWA was in music. Instead, we get an admittedly very funny call-out to that film (“Bye, Felicia“). And we get fan service scenes re-creating Eazy’s pool parties and spouse service scenes like Cube meeting Nicole. There are two other members of the group we learn very little about.
There is still room for a more objective NWA story as cultural and political history. At middle age, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and Eazy’s widow are not as clear-eyed about their own history as NWA was in calling themselves citizen journalists, matching the harshness and brutality around them with the force of their rap. But this is a compelling story with a message as vitally important now as it was during NWA’s brief recording career, with plenty of attitude and then some.
Parents should know that the film includes very strong and crude language, drug dealing, smoking, drinking, wild parties, nudity, sexual references and situations, sad deaths, peril and violence, and archival footage of police brutality and riots.
Family discussion: Was NWA right to perform their song in Detroit? Do you agree that they are journalists? Should there be limits on song lyrics that are profane or bigoted?
If you like this, try: the documentaries about A Tribe Called Quest and Tupac Shakur and the music of NWA
Rated R for language including some sexual references
Profanity:
Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Drinking and smoking
Violence/ Scariness:
Reference to suicide
Diversity Issues:
None
Date Released to Theaters:
August 7, 2015
Date Released to DVD:
November 9, 2015
Amazon.com ASIN:
B0153C71X8
Copyright A4 2015
Form illuminates content in this imperfect but compelling film based on the real-life audiotapes of a four day interview of author David Foster Wallace in the final days of his book tour for Infinite Jest.
The subject of the interview is David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), whose writing was densely and intricately layered. The journalist doing the interview is David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), also a recently published novelist, though his book attracted no attention.
Lipsky persuades his editor at Rolling Stone that Wallace, whose book is a critical and commercial hit, would be a good subject for the magazine. And Wallace, now in the final days of his book tour, agrees to let Lipsky come along. Their wide-ranging (in geography and subject matter) conversation over four days reflects a constantly shifting set of expectations, assumptions, and goals for a construct so essentially artificial it hardly makes sense to call it a relationship. And yet, Lipsky literally moves into Wallace’s man cave of a home and for that time there is a simulation of some kind of friendship between them, at times even a sense that they could be friends, which they both seem to find unsettling and appealing. Wallace’s writing had a fractured, self-referential quality, filled with asides and meta-commentary. So it makes sense that the film has some of those qualities as well. If there were such a thing as cinematic footnotes, they’d be here. Instead, the context itself provides the footnotes. Wallace, whose great subject was American consumer culture, ends up in Minnesota’s Mall of America, eating in the food court as the indoor roller coaster zooms by.
Janet Malcolm famously described a journalist as “a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” We see some evidence of that in “The End of the Tour” but there are several other layers as well. The two men are about the same age, both writers, one lauded as one of the great novelists of his generation, one who released a book that got no attention at all. So Lipsky wants more from Wallace than a story. He is looking for guidance, validation, understanding. He acknowledges that he wants what Wallace has. At the same time he wants to understand why Wallace does not seem to want it. The two men are both relentless, even obsessive, self-observers. As Lipsky is recognizing the gulf between the kind of superficial details that make up a celebrity profile and what it means to actually know someone, he tries to find some kind of foothold. He wants to prove himself to his editor (in real life, the article was never published). And he wants to prove to himself that he is somehow in the same species as Wallace. There is a Mozart/Salieri element here as Lipsky’s greatest talent may be his ability to appreciate Wallace’s genius.
The commitment to verisimilitude is claustrophobic at times because almost all of the dialogue is taken directly from the tapes. An opening scene where Lipsky first hears of Wallace’s suicide and digs out the tapes adds nothing to the story. And yet again this is a case of form following content, as the near-obsessive, even fetishishtic, constricted particularity of the conversation is the kind of thing one of Wallace’s characters might do. The most telling moment in the film is when Wallace admits that he does not mind being profiled in Rolling Stone. He just does not want the profile to make it appear that he wants to be profiled in Rolling Stone. That is exactly the kind of fractured, Schroedinger-ian attraction/repulsion Wallace felt to the themes of his work: the gulf between presentation and reality, between observing and being, between attention and distraction. As Lipsky knew, it is a privilege to be a part of that conversation, even as we must be aware that it is the kind of entertainment — even at this ambitious level — Wallace would both want and not want to see.
Parents should know that this film includes very strong and crude language, sexual references, drinking, and smoking.
Family discussion: Why did Wallace agree to the interview? Why did he get angry with Lipsky?
Interview: Nancy Porter and Harriet Reisen on Louisa May Alcott
Posted on August 6, 2015 at 3:34 pm
No writer has influenced me more than Louisa May Alcott, and it runs in the family. My mother’s name is Josephine, like Alcott’s most famous (and most autobiographical) character, and she was inspired by Little Women to insist on being called “Jo” — and to become a writer. And her grandchildren call her “Marmie,” inspired by “Marmee,” the mother of the little women. I loved the PBS show American Masters: Louisa May Alcott – The Woman Behind Little Women and am delighted that is is now available on DVD through PBS.
Porter lives in Lexington, not far from Concord, where the Alcott family lived along with their contemporaries and friends, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. She said, “We decided to try to make a film about her because there hadn’t been a film about her at all, number one and number two there had not been a biography about her in 30 years. So we felt that this was a good time to do it and so we started a very long process of applying for grants and fund-raising which began with the National Endowment of the Humanities, which gave us a large grant and then the American Masters series and a few others gave us the rest of our money.” It took five years to raise the money. But they were determined to tell her story, which will come as a surprise to those who think of Little Women as non-fiction. “She was no little woman and her life was no children’s book. In fact she was almost 6 feet tall it seems. She was very, very tall and so were all the others which is not how I think of them but they are.”
In Little Women, Jo, the headstrong, independent second daughter who grows up to be a writer, at first tries very dramatic, adventurous, even gothic stories to make money but then, guided by the man she will later marry (unlike Alcott, who never married), Jo writes from her heart, and it is her autobiographical novel about her family, written for children, that brings her true satisfaction as well as success. But the documentary makes it clear that it was the other way around. Reisen acknowledged that Alcott herself created the myth that she was Jo. But in reality she got more pleasure from her more bloodthirsty tales, many of which are collected in Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Porter said, “I think she thought she was writing “moral pap for the young” and she was bound to support her family because she certainly had came from rags to riches. She had many, many jobs and lived in 30 houses and she had this idealist father and her siblings and needed to keep this whole machine going.”
Reisen described her contribution to “a series called the No-Name Series, after the success of Little Women. It was a series of anonymous books by famous authors, anonymously. She wrote one called A Modern Mephistopheles and it’s quite heavy duty. The devil character gives the heroine opium in it and she had a wonderful trip on this drug. So I think she loved writing all the thrillers just to take her to those places.” That story won a prize, and no one believed she had written it.
Reisen and Porter knew that they would have to create re-enactments of some of the elements of Alcott’s story. “First of all, there was almost no images,” said Porter. “So to spin a story about her using archival material was virtually impossible. The other way to do it was to do a more stylized approach, skirts on stairs and shots of the woods, but we really felt like what we needed to do was introduce Louisa to our audience and to make her a living breathing person.” “And modern,” added Reisen. “Somebody who if she had dinner with you, you might not realize she was from the 19th century. Her voice was contemporary. But we were concerned about re-enactments. So every word that the actors speak comes from primary sources. And then we had the scholars and interviewees and for that we had no narration. We wanted them to tell the story feeling that they were primary sources, too.”
Geraldine Brooks, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her novel based on the character of the father from Little Women and the real-life Bronson Alcott who inspired him, appears in the documentary as well. Reisen said, “I think the thing that really struck me about her was a comment she made that everybody says Louisa couldn’t deal with her father, which is why he is gone for much of the book, but she understood as a novelist why that was the only choice.”
Porter and Reisen talked about what made Alcott’s work so successful when it was first published and why it endured. “She is funny and I think girls identify with one of the characters, usually Jo but sometimes Amy or Beth. And all these girls have faults, serious faults and flaws and they work with them and they seem really imperfect but beautifully drawn female characters and they do silly things sometimes but none of them are silly,” Reisen said. “It’s told very well with a great female character and there aren’t that many written at that time,” added Porter. “It’s a classic coming of age story, too.”
Trailer: Nicole Kidman Plays Gertrude Bell in “Queen of the Desert”
Posted on July 28, 2015 at 8:00 am
Nicole Kidman plays Gertrude Bell, the first woman to earn top honors in history at Oxford, fluent in six languages, and one of the great adventurers and scholars of the 20th century. Her spiritual home was the Middle East, where she became a cartographer, archaeologist, writer, and photographer, and during World War I an advisor to British military intelligence. Robert Pattinson plays her friend, T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), and the cast also includes Damian Lewis and James Franco.
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to insist on being called “Jo” — and 
and am delighted that is is now available on DVD through PBS. 
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. Porter said, “I think she thought she was writing “moral pap for the young” and she was bound to support her family because she certainly had came from rags to riches. She had many, many jobs and lived in 30 houses and she had this idealist father and her siblings and needed to keep this whole machine going.”