Suffragette, directed by Sarah Gavron, is the story of the fight to give women the right to vote in the UK, as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were working for women’s suffrage in the United States. This 19-day initiative, known as #Suffragette19, will drive attention to the current state of women’s equality, not just the movie. Everyone can do something and share something.
Copyright 2015 Focus
To enter, send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with Suffragette in the subject line and tell me a woman who is one of your heroes. Don’t forget your address! (US addresses only) I’ll pick a winner at random on November 30, 2015.
Make a Pitch to a Hollywood Producer! TrueSpark Auction
Posted on November 16, 2015 at 12:26 pm
TrueSpark is a wonderful group that provides great films and curriculum materials to schools to help teach students about character and integrity. I am proud to be one of their advisors.
They are having a fundraising auction with three great prizes — lunches with big Hollywood producers that give you a chance to pitch your ideas. The producers of “Soul Surfer,” “Point Break,” and “Limitless” will listen to your ideas and give you feedback on what is necessary to get a film made and distributed. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and the current bids are as low as $500. Check it out!
Copyright 2015 Warner BrothersThere are other numbers they could have used in the title. 121 — that is how old the Chilean Copiapó mine was when it collapsed in 2010. 2300 — that is how many feet underground the men were when it collapsed. 12,000 — the number of miners who die in accidents around the world, we are told as this movie begins. 69 — that is the number of days before they were rescued. Or just 3 — the number of international drilling teams that came to help, along with more than a dozen corporations. And there is some unknown but surely astronomical number that calculates the cost of the rescue, I am sure. But the movie is called “The 33” because it is less the story of the rescue than it is of the survival, the triumph, of the miners who were trapped, who stayed alive by sharing the woefully inadequate scraps of food left for them, along with the even worse facilities for escape in the case of an accident. In one of the movie’s most searing scenes, they learn that the ladders they had been assured could allow them to exit safely in the event of a collapse were never finished. The intercom for emergencies is not connected.
Director Patricia Riggen brings the skill at visual storytelling and tender-hearted but resilient optimism she showed in “Under the Same Moon” to this story. She insisted on filming underground, and the beams of light from the miners’ helmets, so small against the immense darkness of the caverns, are a powerful symbol of the fragility of the miners’ situation. And she opens up the setting just as it becomes unbearable with a poignant fantasy sequence as the starving miners imagine a glorious feast.
We meet the miners at a party and get a sense of who they are — the one who is about to retire, the one who has moved in with his mistress, to the fury of his wife, the one who likes to sing Elvis Presley songs. And we see them go to work, the long, perilous ride, the ominous response of the manager to the complaints of the safety officer. The shards of mirror they lodge in the walls of the mine are shattering, showing that the ground is shifting. “It’s my job to keep them safe,” the supervisor (Lou Diamond Phillips) tells the manager. “It’s your job to keep them pulling out 250 tons a day,” is the reply. “It’s good for another 20 years.” It would not be good for another 20 hours.
Once it has collapsed, the manager refuses to take any action. Either the miners are dead or they will soon be, and there is no way to get them out. The government takes over the mine and sets up operations, with facilities for the families. Soon an entire village is operating outside the mine, including one miner’s pregnant wife, another’s estranged sister (Juliette Binoche), and the feuding wife and mistress. There is a school for the children, a commissary for supplies, a medical facility. They call it Camp Hope.
The first issue is finding out whether there are any survivors. The moment when the note is retrieved, “We are well in the shelter, the 33 of us,” is jubilant. Then there is the challenge of keeping them alive. Food and sleeping bags (and iPods) are sent down and Skype communications are established. But the greatest engineers in the world cannot figure out how to drill down enough of a hole for a rescue without endangering them further. International press has cameras everywhere.
Meanwhile, the stress on the 33 is severe. Who will be their leader? What if they do not agree?
This is a story that was made for the movies and Riggen tells it well. We join the vigil with the families, and the scene of the real miners at the end shows us why the number that really matters is the one that defines them as a group forever.
Parents should know that this film includes dire extended peril and near-starvation, some strong language, and sexual references, some crude, and alcohol abuse.
Family discussion: Was that the best way for the trapped miners to pick a leader? Who should make sure that corporate facilities are safe and what should the penalties be if they are not? Read about the current trial of the former Massey Energy CEO in the US, following a mining accident that killed 29 mine workers.
If you like this, try: the NOVA documentary shown on PBS about the rescue, focusing on the NASA scientists and engineers, and the documentary “Buried Alive”
Copyright 2015 Bleeker StreetThe post-WWII era was one of great relief and great fear. The Nazis had been defeated, but at the cost of bringing into the world the horror of atomic weapons. It was a certainty that the next war would be the last. The US could not last as the only superpower. The communists would do anything to get the bomb, and once they had it, no one was safe.
And that is why, just after the United States fought to preserve liberty and freedom of speech, those very ideals began to seem like a threat to our safety. And when there is a threat, there will be demagogues who prey on people’s fears to make themselves more powerful. That was the case in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s when Americans became so terrified of communism that the very idea someone might have been or known a communist was enough to get them fired and blacklisted — unless they were willing to “name names” and give investigators a list of other people to investigate. It was a kind of perverse pyramid scheme.
That is what happened to Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston), one of Hollywood’s most successful and highest paid screenwriters. He was also a member of the Communist Party. The idea that somehow screenwriters would brainwash moviegoers into becoming communists was such a threat that he and nine other writers who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee were blacklisted (not allowed to work in Hollywood anymore). Trumbo was sent to prison for contempt (refusal to cooperate).
When he came out, he managed to find work by getting other writers to put their names on the scripts he created (including two Oscar-winners) and by writing scripts at a fraction of his previous salary for a schlock producer (hilariously played by John Goodman).
Director Jay Roach creates the world of Trumbo, fiercely intelligent and committed. Cranston is excellent as Trumbo, every line of his posture and every gesture showing us the the active intelligence of the man who took his own struggle for freedom and turned it into one of the greatest lines in movie history: “I am Spartacus!” As he types madly away from his bathtub (to ease his back pain) and fights to find work for the other blacklisted writers, he never loses his sense of amusement at the folly around him. He is skeptical, even cynical at times but never loses his sense of optimism that even something good can be made better.
Parents should know that this film includes strong language, some crude references, brief non-sexual nudity, drinking, smoking, and drug use, and some tense and disturbing scenes.
Family discussion: What themes of this film are particularly relevant today? What should Trumbo have done? How did his experience influence his films? Why was it important to pay back the money?
If you like this, try: Trumbo’s films, including “Spartacus,” “Roman Holiday,” and “Lonely Are the Brave” and other films about this ear like “The Front” and “Goodnight and Good Luck”
Tormented but brilliant chef Adam Jones (Bradley Cooper) invites the sous chef he hopes to persuade to come work for him to lunch. At Burger King. They are both food snobs. She does not want to touch anything in the fast food outlet and is barely willing to sit in the booth. And he, improbably but only slightly more improbable than pretty much everything else in the movie, tries to persuade her that it is part of the rich tradition of “peasant food.” Yes, it is a lesser cut of meat, but that is why it is so imaginatively prepared.
Uh, no. That is not true of Burger King, and it is not true of this film, a lesser cut of meat indeed, and not deserving of the terms “imaginative” or “peasant food.” We don’t believe the praise for fast food from a guy who says anything less than perfect must be thrown away, that a chef must apologize not to the boss or to the customer but to the piece of turbot for inferior preparation. We don’t believe that a man who says he does not want customers to appreciate his food — he wants them to ache with longing — would eat a Whopper.
Most important, we just do not believe Adam, even with Cooper’s piercing blue eyes and movie star magic, is more than a lesser cut of meat himself. Here’s a hint, Hollywood — it is often fatal to a movie to have its characters more in thrall to the lead than the audience is.
We meet Adam as he is completing his self-imposed penance for sins we will spend the rest of the film learning about. The three-year expiation — shucking one million oysters. Does that have anything to do with making amends to those he harmed? No, but it is picturesque and it gives him a chance to tell us that oysters and apples cannot be improved upon, but it is the duty of the chef to try.
It turns out that Adam was once a star of the foodie world, but hubris — and many, many drugs — led to his downfall, taking lots of other people down with him. And so, we see him visit his old friends, enemies, and frenimies, to see if he can put the old band back together to make culinary history and achieve a third Michelin star.
For those who missed the Michelin star lecture in The 100-Foot Journey, we get the “Star Wars” version here. One star from the legendary rater of restaurants is Luke Skywalker. Two stars are “whoever Alec Guinness was” (Obi-Wan Kenobi). And three stars is the Jedi Master: Yoda. (I actually prefer Michelin’s own cost-benefit analysis approach: worth a stop, worth a detour, worth a journey.)
Or, in movie terms, worth a theater ticket, worth a Netflix rental, wait for cable. This falls somewhere between the second and third category. Food and food preparation are presented with loving, luscious care far in excess of the attention to the story or characters, neither especially well seasoned or fresh.
Parents should know that this film has constant very strong language, some sexual references, references to drug abuse, some angry confrontations, and brief violence.
Family discussion: Would you want to eat in Adam’s restaurant? What do you think of his million-oyster penance?
If you like this, try: “Chef” and “Babette’s Feast” and reality shows about Mario Batali and Gordon Ramsey, who worked on this film
