Amazing Grace

Posted on January 28, 2007 at 10:45 am

Parents should know that this film includes frank descriptions of some of the most profound atrocities of the slave trade, including torture and rape. The painful symptoms of Wilberforce’s long-term illness are also included. The movie’s portrayal of extraordinary leadership, courage, and persistance is in the context of positions taken by other characters that by today’s standards are obviously inhumane and racist.


Families who see this film should talk about why Wilberforce was among the first to see that slavery must be abolished. What was different about the situation in Britain that permitted this to be accomplished years before slavery was abolished in America, and without a war? How are the arguments and tactics adopted by the opposition similar to those used in other great debates, from civil rights to women’s suffrage?

Families who appreciate this movie will want to learn more about William Wilberforce and William Pitt, the youngest prime minister in British history. Families will also appreciate Amistad and the groundbreaking television miniseries Roots. The essay “When Mr. Beecher Sold Slaves in Plymouth Pulpit” describes the actions of abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe) took the dramatic step of staging a slave auction to demonstrate its barbarity. Families will enjoy Bill Moyers’ superb PBS special about the history of the hymn “Amazing Grace.”

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Alpha Dog

Posted on January 10, 2007 at 12:38 pm

“This whole thing is about parenting,” explains the ironically named Sonny Truelove (Bruce Willis). He is telling an off-screen questioner about his son Johnny (Emile Hirsch). Or, the questioner is trying to get some answers from Sonny, but not making much progress.


The credits come up as Eva Cassidy sings “Over the Rainbow,” and we see tender home-movie footage of sweet children playing at home, on the beach, at parties, a bar mitzvah. And then we see Johnny, a drug dealer always surrounded by his posse and their girlfriends, in a constant haze of pervasive anomie characterized by exhausted macho and empty sensation-seeking. They bump blindly through an endless series of joyless thrills — video games, rap music videos, insults and posturing, sex, drugs, drinking, and smoking, an R-rated version of the Pleasure Island where Pinocchio turned into a donkey. There are petty quarrels and petty protestations of loyalty, both involving outlandish posturing followed by interest fading as fast as whatever buzz they’re on. Two people owe Johnny money. First is Elvis (Shawn Hatosy), who is paying it off by performing menial tasks and enduring abuse, choking back his fury. Second is Jake (Ben Foster), hot-headed and with no patience for being told what to do.

The dispute escalates when Jake trashes Johnny’s house. Johnny, out with a couple of his friends looking for Jake, sees Jake’s 15-year old half-brother Zach (Anton Yelchin). At first they start to beat him up but then they take him, a human marker for his half-brother’s debt.


Hopped up on drugs, desperation, and gangsta fantasies, they tug Zach from one house to another in a kind of floating party. Zach is happy to go along with it. In some vague way, he thinks he is helping Jake. The pretty girls call him “Stolen Boy,” and he enjoys the attention and the drugs. It is thrilling to hang out with people who seem so tough and cool. And back home, his parents are waiting to yell at him about the bong they found in his room. “It’s a story to tell my grandchildren,” he says, turning down several chances to get away.


But he won’t have any grandchildren. And he won’t make it home to get in trouble over the bong. Johnny panics and offers call it even with Elvis if he will get rid of Zach for good. Elvis sees a chance to get out from under and stop being treated like less than a man.


With a feeling of terrible inevitability from the beginning, the story unfolds, day by day, identifying characters and passers-by as witnesses so we know that sometime in the future they will be swearing to tell the truth before they tell the story of what they saw. There are half a dozen “almost” moments as various people offer Zach a chance to escape, start to back out, or go along or ignore what was going on. There were so many reasons this should not have happened. These boys came from affluent communities. They did not grow up seeing drive-by killings or wearing gang colors. Except on rap videos.

Without any guidance from their parents, the line between the fantasy of the rap lyrics and the reality of taking a life disappears. Every adult in the movie is ineffectual, narcissistic, childish, or absent.

Writer/director Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook) says he was inspired to make this film because his daughter attended the same school as the real-life inspiration for Johnny Truelove, the gaudily named Jesse James Hollywood. He conveys the blankness and bleakness of this culture so well that it seems at times like just another rap video, more likely to inspire just another set of foolish, trigger-happy kids than to scare them straight. Hirsch, Timberlake, Milchan, Foster, and Hatosy all give excellent performances, despite the limited vocabulary
that requires most of what they do to be literally between the lines. But Willis and Sharon Stone as Zach’s mother do not fare well in the bleached-out tones of the cinematography. Stone stays at one shrill note except for her last scene, in a fat suit so distracting and bizarre that it obliterated her sensitive handling of the distraught mother’s grief and elicited laughs from the audience.


Hollywood, captured by the FBI in 2005 after a five-year search, was featured on “America’s Most Wanted.” His flashy name and comfortable background attracted a lot of interest from the press and the public. But it is not always easy to make a true crime story dramatic instead of sensational, and that is where this film falters. It is all sensation rather than insight.

The characters are all flash and emptiness, but so is the story. Yes, the parents are clueless, neglectful, or worse — a mother tells her distraught daughter she can’t talk because she is high, and Johnny’s drug business is overseen by his father. Yes, the guys got swept away in their own gangsta dreams and drug-addled grandiosity. But this movie has nothing more to tell us, and is more a high-style “America’s Most Wanted” re-enactment than a drama.

Ultimately, they were just dumb. And it seems solipsistic, superficial, and short-sighted to put so much energy into the story of this murder when so little attention is paid to murders of non-white, non-suburban kids. It’s not a problem that the movie does not try to answer the why of the murder but it is a serious failure that it never answers the why of its own purpose.

Parents should know that this film has extremely mature material, including constant profanity and bad language, drug use and drug dealing, smoking, drinking, fighting, and very explicit sexual references and situations, including group sex. A 15-year-old is abducted, given drugs, seduced, and murdered. There are profoundly dysfunctional families. Friends abuse each other with mock — and serious — insults and destructive pranks. There are disturbing interactions and there is an overall tone of amoral sensation-seeking that is unsettling.

Families who see this movie should talk about who could have stopped this crime and why they did not. Why does it begin with home movies? Do you agree with Sonny’s statement that the story is about parenting? Why did Zach cooperate with his abductors? Did Elvis and Frankie have different reasons for doing what Johnny told them? What were they?

Viewers who appreciate this film will also like River’s Edge, Wonderland, and The Lost Boys. For more information about the real-life murder of Zach Markowitz and the long search for the man called Johnny Truelove in this film, see this article.

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Accepted

Posted on August 14, 2006 at 12:10 pm

Bartleby (Justin Long) has been turned down at every single college he applied to. His friends’ college plans have also turned out badly.

No problem. Bartleby is a can-do Ferris Bueller type — without “Twist and Shout,” a red Ferrari, a wealthy family, or a clever script.

He makes up a college, the South Harmon Institute of Technology. Its initials provide not only some sense of the movie’s level of humor but also the script’s most frequent word. All goes well until he realizes that he’s going to need more than a website and an acceptance letter. Eventually, the summer will end and he will need an actual place to go.

No problem.

Bartleby and his friends fix up a building and hire an alcoholic former professor-turned-shoe-salesman (Lewis Black) to act as its dean.


All goes well until it turns out a lot of other kids have gone to the fake school’s fake website and printed out what they think are real letters of acceptance, and they show up expecting to move in and to go to school.


Problem.


Fortunately, all of those kids have brought checks for their tuition, so Bartleby sets up a system of student-led learning, using that term very loosely. And all goes very, very well indeed until the snobby kids at the real college nearby decide to arrange for a simultaneous South Harmon parents’ weekend and a visit from the accredidation authorities.


Big problem.


This movie doesn’t have the intellectual heft to write its name correctly to get 200 points on its SATs, but the unpretentious good humor of its cast, brisk running time, a couple of funny lines, and the wish fulfillment fantasy of a college where you can do anything you want give it some genial appeal. It helps, too, that aside from the bad language, underage drinking, slight air of nihilism, and, what is that other thing, oh, yes, the fact that all the characters lie and cheat, there is some real sweetness in the way the characters treat each other. If this movie was a college application essay, it would be the kind that makes the office of admissions decide to overlook lackluster grades and take a chance.

Parents should know that this movie has very strong language and very crude humor for a PG-13. Characters drink and make fake IDs for those underage. There are some crude sexual remarks but the movie’s heroes and heroines do not engage in casual sex. However, the main characters engage in a great deal of risky and unethical behavior. For example, they lie, cheat, and steal.

Families who see this movie should talk about the pressure on high school students to get into the “right” college. They may also want to look at highly respected schools with alternative programs that give students the chance to design their own curriculum. Summerhill is an educational classic, now out of date but still worth reading. Do you think Bartleby’s name is a possible tribute to the Herman Melville’s character who said “I prefer not to” when asked to do his job?


Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Camp Nowhere, which has an almost identical plot, as well as other campus comedies from Monkey Business to National Lampoon’s Animal House (for mature audiences only), Good News, and P.C.U.

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An Inconvenient Truth

Posted on May 24, 2006 at 3:36 pm

No zombies. No chain saws. No mutants. No aliens. No meteors hurtling toward Earth. And yet, this is the scariest movie of the year, not, as some jokes suggest, because it is a two-hour Power Point Presentation by famously un-exciting former Vice President Al Gore, but because this is real, this is happening, and we can’t count on Bruce Willis or Will Smith to save the day.


Al Gore first became interested in the problem of climate change as a result of a visionary teacher he had in college who was the first person to begin to map the increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He has now given this presentation more than 1000 times, going from flip charts to fancy animated graphics. His somewhat stiff but clearly deeply felt delivery turns out to be just right for this material. Anything else would sound shrill and shriek-y. And as he presents the science of the causes, the impacts so far, and the prospects for the future, his relentless but calm tone makes it possible for us to stay with the story without feeling shrill or shriek-y ourselves.


There are a few welcome digressions into Gore’s personal life that help us understand why he feels that this is not a polticial or a scientific issue as much as a moral one. There is an unwelcome and distracting digression into the 2000 election that wafts a whiff of sour grapes over the description of the Bush administration’s policies. But other than that brief derailment, the movie is mesmerizing. Ultimately, crucially, it is hopeful, ending with a sense of purpose and confidence that we can do what is necessary.

Families who see this movie will want to find out more about the problems it describes and what they can do to help. The film’s website is a good place to start. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s global warming site has information for adults and children. Another point of view is here, produced by a conservative think tank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Slate Magazine’s Gregg Easterbrook challenges some of the moral and scientific points made in the movie here. A search for “climate change” or “Kyoto accords” on the website maintained by the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives will provide an update on current proposals and debates. Other resources include the Pew Center and the Exploratorium.

Families should talk about how we sort through different opinions, sometimes even different facts presented by a range of sources. They should also talk about the range of responses for individuals and communities.

Families who appreciate this film will also like Darwin’s Nightmare, Koyaanisqatsi, March of the Penguins, The Future of Food, and The Yes Men.

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