Lincoln

Posted on November 8, 2012 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for an intense scene of war violence, some images of carnage, and brief strong language
Profanity:	Some strong language, one f-word
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Battle violence with some graphic images, sad deaths, assassination
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	November 9, 2012
Date Released to DVD:	March 25, 2013
Amazon.com ASIN:	B009AMANH4

The first question about big, prestige films like “Lincoln” is always where it falls on what I call the spinach scale. Will I tell people to see it because it is entertaining or because it is good for them. For all its meticulous attention to historical verisimilitude and its extended depiction of people in rooms talking about a Constitutional amendment, “Lincoln” is not an eat-your-spinach-because-it’s-good-for-you movie. It is a robust, engrossing story that illuminates our own time as well as the era of the 16th and arguably greatest President.

Task number one for director Steven Spielberg, screenwriter Tony Kushner (Angels in America), and star Daniel Day-Lewis is to make the icon into a human being, to show us his greatness but also his humanity. In our hearts, this almost-literally larger than life man sounds like James Earl Jones — we can almost hear that deep voice reciting the Gettysburg address. But those who actually heard Lincoln speak described his voice as high, thin, and reedy-sounding. It may be jarring at first, but in an exceptionally well-designed introductory scene Day-Lewis deploys that timbre with such gentleness and modesty that it quickly becomes an asset not just to his performance but to our understanding of this man.

Lincoln is sitting quietly, talking to a small group of Union soldiers, two black and two white. We see immediately that the soldiers respect him greatly — they can recite the Gettysburg address from memory — but that they feel completely comfortable being honest with him about their experiences and their recommendations. What we feel immediately is that he is both respected and trusted, and that he has a rare ability to listen. He may not be a modest man — at one point he thunders, “I am the President of the United States and clothed in immense power!” But he is a humble man, who understands that he can best lead by allowing others to move forward with him. He loves to share stories, more than others love to hear them. But like a great preacher, he knows that it is the stories that persuade people. Everyone softens a little for a story, especially one with a punchline. And a story helps the listener toward the conclusion without feeling pushed.

A century and a half later, audiences may be surprised to see how little has changed. Indeed, even the vilest insults of the Twitterverse and the shrillest complaints of Super-PAC ads do not touch the comments made by Members of Congress, who do not hesitate to question each other’s integrity or sanity. “Fatuous nincompoop,” for example.

Audiences may be more surprised to find that “Democrat” and “Republican” seem to have switched places. What has not changed is the way that politics attracts people of great cowardice and even greater courage, of people who hold on and people who reach forward, of people who want to help themselves and people who want to help others at great cost to themselves, including those who can never thank them.

When Lincoln decides that his most important priority is eradicating slavery through approval of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, his team brings in a trio of lobbyists (John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, and a wonderfully puckish James Spader) who are as cheerfully cynical as anyone on K Street today. Through a combination of bribes and threats, they work to get the votes they need. It is clear the Civil War is about to end, and if the South is readmitted to the Union, it will never pass. Lincoln understood that the only way to keep the country together was to take its most divisive issue off the table. He also understood that doing so would have its own terrible costs. Even those who supported the Amendment had to make compromises, including its most ardent defender (a scene-stealing performance by Tommy Lee Jones as Pennsylvania’s Thaddeus Stevens).

Kushner and Spielberg, like their main character, recognize the power of story-telling, and this illuminating tale would make its subject proud and perhaps to inspire all of us to aspire to that as well.

Parents should know that this film has some battle scenes, graphic images in hospital including amputated limbs, some strong language including one f-word, sad losses, drinking, and smoking.

Family discussion: There are a lot of compromises in this movie and a lot of shading of the truth – which were the most difficult? Why was the passage of the 13^th amendment so important? What moments in the film reminded you of today’s political debates and strategies?

If you like this, try: some of the other portrayals of Lincoln on film, including “Young Mr. Lincoln” and “Abe Lincoln of Illinois” and the musical about the Declaration of Independence, “1776”

Cloud Atlas

Posted on October 25, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Six nested stories set in the past, present, and future entwine grand themes of the conflicts between those who would oppress and those who demand freedom, those who must create and those who want to repeat what is already there, those who love and those who are afraid to love or be loved. Some in the audience will be enchanted by the grand scope of the story-telling and the intricate details of the mosaic that make up each of the story’s parts. Others will be impatient with the gimmicks and distracted by the prosthetics, wigs, and make-up. Many will grapple with the frustration of experiencing both reactions.

When they made the “Matrix” films, they were known as the Wachowski brothers, Andy and Larry. But since then, Larry has become Lana while resisting terms like “transition” as “complicity in a binary gender narrative.” That clearly fueled the commitment to age, race, and gender fluidity throughout the film. Even the most sharp-eyed cataloger of prosthetic noses and teeth will be surprised as the credits reveal the multiple roles taken by Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving (Mr. Smith in the “Matrix” films), Hugh Grant, Jim Sturgess, James Broadbent, Ben Wishaw, Keith David, Doona Bae, and others.

The oldest story, set in the early 19th century and told in the traditional style of ahistorical drama, has Sturgess as a man disturbed by the abuse of slaves in the Pacific who is being poisoned by a doctor (Hanks) he thinks is curing him. His journals become a book on a shelf in the next story, set in the 1930’s, with a musician (Wishaw) writing to the man he loves about assisting a venerated composer and working on his own composition, called “Cloud Atlas.” In the 1970’s, styled to remind us of that era’s “paranoid cinema” films like “The Parallax View” and “The China Syndrome,” an investigative reporter (Berry) gets stuck in an elevator with an elderly scientist who gives her some important information about a nuclear facility. She discovers his 40-years-old correspondence with the musician in his papers. In the present day, we see something of a shaggy dog story as a British publisher (Broadbent) goes on the run from hooligans and ends up having to escape from a “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”-style facility.

Two stories are set in the future. The first, in what is now Korea, has a “Blade Runner-“ish society made up of consumers and “fabricants.” One of them sees a movie based on the story of the publisher’s escape (starring Hanks), which helps her understand that she must rebel against the abuses of her society. Her story becomes part of the origin myths of a post-apocalyptic society hundreds of years even farther into the future, where much of humanity has returned to an almost bronze-age level of technology and everyone speaks in a Jar-Jar Binks form of pidgin English that may have worked better on the printed page but on screen is intrusive and overdone.

As the the “Matrix” films, the more specific and concrete it gets, the less resonance it has. Its greatest message about human aspiration and inspiration and connection is in the message as medium. The scope and audacity of this undertaking, the biggest budget independent film in history, with the Wachowskis putting up their own homes to make the final budget numbers, outshines the details that never quite reach the clouds.

Parents should know that this film includes some graphic violence including murders, rape, shoot-outs, knives, arrows, suicide, brutal whipping, poison, car crashes, and a character being thrown off a balcony. Characters are in peril, injured and killed. There are dead bodies with disturbing images, some strong words including f-word and n-word, gay and heterosexual sexual references and explicit situations as well as nudity, crude sexual humor, portrayal of slavery and totalitarianism, smoking, and drug use.

Family discussion: Which of the stories was the most compelling and why? Who was the bravest character? Who learned the most?

If you like this, try: the book by David Mitchell and the “Matrix” movies

Snow White and the Huntsman

Posted on May 31, 2012 at 6:06 pm

Director Rupert Sanders is known for making television commercials that look like fairy tales, with angels falling from the sky for a guy who uses Axe body spray and a boy battling samurai warriors with Excalibur to sell X-Box game consoles. With his first feature film he has made a fairy tale that looks like a commercial, with every frame filled with eye-popping images and a lot of dramatic posing. A 30 second version would have made a great commercial for perfume or skin cream. As a movie, it is just so-so, with uneven performances and dodgy pacing. After over 100 movie versions of the classic fairy tale about the girl whose lips are red as blood, skin is white as snow, and hair black as ebony and the evil stepmother who orders her taken into the woods and killed, the Disney animated version is still the fairest of them all.

Like Tarsem’s superior “Mirror Mirror,” released earlier this year, this version makes Snow White into an action heroine, leading the battle against her evil stepmother. Charlize Theron plays Ravenna, who literally bewitches a king grieving for his late wife. She murders him on their wedding night, taking over his kingdom with the help of her creepy brother/henchman Finn (Sam Spruell) and locking the young princess in a grubby tower. Ravenna cares for just one thing — eternal beauty. She swans around looking haughty in fabulous Colleen Atwood costumes that can best be described as haute predator couture, with all kinds of intricate spikes and skulls. Everything is either sharp or poisonous and laced-up tightly, with talon-like finger-armor. She stalks and flounces nicely but when it is time for her to get ferocious she is all eye-rolls and screeches, a bad version of Carol Burnett doing Norma Desmond.

Ravenna has an enormous gold mirror that looks like giant frisbee hanging on the wall, and the robed creature who lives inside assures her that she is the fairest in the land. She also gets some reassurance from skeevy Finn, with whom she shares the creepiest brother watching his sister take a bath scene since “Bunny Lake is Missing.” You also know he’s twisted from his terrible haircut, a sort of medieval mullet.

While Ravenna is bathing in thick cream and literally sucking the life out of young women, Snow White (Kristen Stewart) is still locked in the tower. For years. But she stays so pure that when the birds come to perch on her window, she does not grab and eat them. She just allows them to show her a loose nail she can use as a weapon, which comes in very handy as Finn arrives shortly to indicate some predatory tendencies and take her to the queen. The mirror guy has informed Ravenna that Snow White has come of age. Her purity is so powerful that she alone has the power to destroy Ravenna, says the mirror. But her power is so great that if Ravenna can eat her heart, she will no longer need touch-ups and refills. Her beauty will stay as it is forever.

When Snow White escapes into the Dark Forest, where everything is creepy and scary and even Ravenna has no power. The only person who knows the Dark Forest well enough to bring her back is The Huntsman (no name), played by “The Avengers'” Thor, Chris Hemsworth. Ravenna promises to bring his dead wife back to life if he will capture the prisoner and he agrees to go. But Snow White isn’t the only one who gets tripped up in the forest. Sanders gets much too enmeshed in all of the tree-branches-turning to snakes-style special effects and the forest section of the film goes on much too long, with at least three too many set-ups and confrontations, including the return of Finn. And it gets worse when they emerge into a sort of Light Forest fairyland, when the story really starts to go haywire, with a whole “chosen one” theme that had people in the audience groaning. Stewart is out of her league. She is fine playing characters like the vulnerable Bella in “Twilight,” but when called on here to inspire the troops, she sounds like she is ordering pizza.

And then there are the dwarfs. It is hard to imagine that in 2012 anyone could think it is appropriate to cast full-size actors, no matter how talented and no matter how persuasive the special effects, as little people. It is a shame to see Bob Hoskins, Nick Frost, Ian McShane, Toby Jones, and others in roles that should be played by little people. By the time they show up, the plot has fallen apart, with an unnecessary love triangle and a preposterous encounter with a troll. Nearly everyone’s accents waver, some of the dialogue is truly awful, and I am certain no one in a fairy tale should ever use the word “okay.” Recasting Snow White as the hero of her own story is long overdue and production designer Dominic Watkins creates some real magic. But this is not only not the best Snow White; it’s not the best one in the last four months.

Parents should know that this film includes fantasy and battle violence with many characters injured and killed, and some graphic and disturbing images including bloody wounds, bugs, and snakes. There is brief partial nudity and some scenes of a brother watching his sister bathe and then suggestively touching a young woman in a predatory manner.

Family discussion: How did Ravenna’s costumes reflect her character? How did the three drops of blood spilled by both characters’ mothers show their connection?

If you like this, try: Some of the more than 100 other movie versions of this story including the recent “Mirror Mirror” and the Disney animated classic

For Greater Glory

Posted on May 31, 2012 at 6:00 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
Profanity:	Mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended battle violence with many characters and animals killed, children tortured and killed
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie, strong female characters
Date Released to Theaters:	June 1, 2012

In 1926, the atheist President of Mexico Plutarco Elias Calles (Rubén Blades) decided to secularize the country by edict. He deported non-Mexican priests and prohibited the remaining priests from appearing outside of the churches in their cassocks. Rebels fought back, at first with peaceful protests and then with increasing force until it became an armed conflict known as the Cristero War or Christiada. This film, financed in part by the Catholic fraternal society The Knights of Columbus, is a faith-based and often heavy-handed retelling of the story, focusing on characters who have since been recognized by the church as martyrs and canonized.

Andy Garcia and Oscar Isaac bring some depth and dignity to a script that is sincere but clunky. Garcia plays Enrique Gorostieta Velarde, a non-believer married to a devout woman (Eva Longoria) and a former general now painfully under-employed as a manager at a soap factory. When the Cristeros offer him the job of commanding their troops, he accepts because he wants to do the work he was born for, because it will please his wife, and because, he discovers, he would like to believe in something. One of his biggest challenges is winning the respect of the Cristero’s legendary fighter, Victoriano Ramirez (Isaac), known as “El Catorce” because he defeated fourteen of the President’s army by himself. Rodriguez plays one of the women who played key roles in transporting guns and ammunition.

The battle scenes are impressively staged and there are some affecting moments, but it assumes a level of belief and commitment on the part of its audience that may not apply to those who are not familiar with Catholic teachings. Ultimately, it is closer to worship than story-telling, more likely to validate believers than to engage new hearts.

Parents should know that this film has extended battle violence with many characters and animals injured and killed, graphic and disturbing images, and a harrowing scene of a child who is tortured and killed.

Family discussion: How does the quote at the beginning of the movie relate to the story? How did participating in the fight change the general’s mind about God?

If you like this, try: “The Mission” and “Braveheart”

“It’s May!” (Camelot)

Posted on May 1, 2012 at 8:00 am

Vanessa Redgrave sings “It’s May” from the Lerner and Lowe musical Camelot.