FREE TICKETS to a screening of “Captive” with Kate Mara and David Oyelowo in the True Story of the Hostage Who Read Purpose Driven Life to Her Captor
Posted on September 14, 2015 at 4:12 pm
I have a limited number of tickets to give away to a Silver Spring, Maryland screening on September 17, 2015 of “Captive,” based on the true story of Ashley Smith, who was held hostage by a murderer and read aloud to him from Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?. Smith has written her own book: Captive: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Hostage Hero. In the movie, she is played by Kate Mara, and her captor, a prison escapee who killed a judge and three law enforcement officers, is played by David Oyelowo. This special screening is in connection with the Night of Purpose, a nationwide event with exclusive content.
Click here for the free passes. NOTE: a pass does not guarantee a seat. Get there at least one hour early to ensure that you will be able to see the film.
After three very different movies, we know two things about writer/director J.C. Chandor. First, he is already one of today’s most original, thought-provoking directors, with a remarkably mature and insightful eye, and second, he is vitally interested in the survival instincts of characters who are under the direst of pressures. His “Margin Call” is the best take we have seen yet from Hollywood on the Wall Street meltdown, taking place in one day as a huge financial firm finds out it is on the wrong side of a bet that will bring down the entire company. It is filled with sharp, smart, character-defining dialogue that all but sizzles. His second film was “All is Lost,” an almost-wordless, one-character story with Robert Redford trying to stay alive a boat that is damaged in a collision, and an ending that viewers are still debating. And now, his third film is his first period piece, set in 1981 New York, one of the most violent years in the city’s history.
Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain star as Abel and Anna Morales, husband and wife and ambitious owners of a home heating oil company. The company is doing well and they have the chance to take it to the next level with the purchase of some property on the water that will reduce their delivery costs. But they are under tremendous pressure, moving into an expensive new home, on the hook to come up with the money for the land in 30 days, under investigation by a prosecutor who is equally ambitious (“Selma’s” David Oyelowo), and being pushed hard by cut-throat competition from his competitors, who harass his drivers, hijack his trucks, and steal his oil.
Like Michael Corleone, Abel wants to be strictly legitimate, but he is not there yet.
Both husband and wife are trying to move past their origins into the upper middle class. Abel is an immigrant who began as a driver for the company when it was owned by Anna’s father, a gangster. They love each other deeply, but each is by nature mistrustful and secretive. “You won’t like what happens if I get involved,” Anna tells Abel, and they both know he is right. Anna and Abel may have some trust issues but Isaac and Chastain, who have been friends since they studied together at Juilliard, as actors have a fearlessness with each other that requires complete trust as actors. Every scene they are in together crackles.
We first see Abel running through the streets. This was when running first became popular as exercise. But Abel is running all the time. Isaac is always calm and reassuring in his manner, but he has a white-hot inner fury. That is probably what drew Anna to him. He wants it all — money, respectability, family. And he knows that in order to get it he will have to deal with some very bad people and some very weak people and that means he might have to do some very bad things and some people might get hurt.
In his first period film, Chandor creates an atmosphere so authentic we can almost taste the smog. He has been compared to Sidney Lumet for the gritty, layered texture of the settings and the storyline. He is extraordinarily gifted with actors, starting with the casting. Alessandro Nivola is superb as a highly civilized gangster who lives in a home so fortified it tells us how thin that veneer of civilization really is. He creates a complex and fully-realized world that brings home Faulkner’s famous line: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”
Parents should know that this film includes very strong language, and some peril and violence including guns, suicide, and criminal activity, drinking, and smoking.
Family discussion: How would this story be different if it took place today? Why does the film begin with Abel running?
If you like this, try: “Margin Call” and “All is Lost” from the same director
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
Copyright 2014 Cloud Eight Films
“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”
Interview: David Oyelowo of “Lee Daniels’ The Butler”
Posted on August 16, 2013 at 8:00 am
David Oyelowo (“Red Tails”) plays the son of the title character in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.” Louis is a rebellious young man who becomes deeply involved in the 1960’s and 70’s struggle for equal rights, first through sit-ins and voter registration and then with the Black Panthers. His estrangement and reconciliation with his father, a White House butler, is the heart of the film.
Your character aged over decades and you seemed very specific about the choices you made in showing that the character was getting older.
When Lee Daniels approached me about playing the role I was very clear that I really wanted the opportunity to play it all the way through. Early on, he was thinking about splitting it with a younger actor. But I had played Henry VI on stage, and he goes from age 14 to his sixties. I learned just how much you can depict through the eyes, the body movement, what’s going on emotionally. Even moreso on film than in the theater because you have the eyes, the small gestures that indicate a wealth of experience or a lack of that. I had to employ more technical aspects over the three month shoot. I would sleep for 10 hours the night before I had to play a teenager and I’d sleep four or five hours when I had to play older. I’d go to the gym to shed weight very quickly to play the younger character and I’d eat a lot of salty food and drink a lot of water that bloats me out to play the older character. All of those things help as well. But when you have a good script that goes to the heart of what a character’s going through at any time that helps with the details.
How did you and Forest Whitaker, who plays your character’s father, work together to develop that relationship?
We didn’t spend a lot of time talking through it as that was appropriate because what you’re seeing for a lot of the movie is a disconnect. The generational divide manifests because they are both products of their environment. He grew up in the South and grew up with lynching and saw his father shot before his eyes. That’s entirely different to my character’s experience, a middle-class upbringing, and my life by comparison is a lot nicer. But the inequality that we both suffered, the injustice that is intrinsic to American society is undeniable and something that we both feel a need to fight but in very different ways. We both felt a need to just trust that as we go on very separate paths, the payoff is going to be at the end of the movie, a shared appreciation of each other’s journey toward what was effectively the same goal. It was that butting of heads internally that led to the combustive elements that led to bringing about irrevocable change, that internal argument about what it is to be a man, a woman, a human being in America regardless of the color of your skin.
You are from Great Britain and much of this happened before you were born. What did you do to research the era?
You name it, “Eyes on the Prize,” many books. One of the great things about the era is that it is in living memory for lots of people who are able to be very articulate about it. The resources personally for me as an actor were infinite. Can one person really go through all those things? Yes, there are people who were at the sit-ins and rode on the bus and went into politics. My character is a composite but he represents the experience of real people.
Rated PG-13 for some violence and disturbing images, language, sexual material, thematic elements and smoking
Profanity:
Some strong language, n-word and other racist epithets
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Drinking and alcohol abuse, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:
Peril and violence including police brutality, lynching, murder, rape (off-camera), sad deaths
Diversity Issues:
A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:
August 16, 2013
Date Released to DVD:
January 13, 2014
Amazon.com ASIN:
B00EV4EUT8
Washington Post reporter Wil Haygood was covering the 2008 Obama campaign when some young black women told him that they were going to vote for America’s first major party Presidential candidate who was African-American, even though their fathers told them not to. The generational chasm that separated the fathers who were not ready to see one of their heritage in the White House and the daughters who were inspired him to check to see whether there might be someone in the White House itself who was of that older generation. He found one, Eugene Allen, who had been a butler in the White House from the Truman administration to the Reagan administration, and who was planning to vote for Barack Obama, and Haygood wrote an article telling his story.
That story inspired this film, with Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines, born on a plantation in the Jim Crow south and serving eight Presidents while raising two sons. Like the young women Haygood met, the next generation had very different ideas and aspirations. The conflict between a man whose job was to serve by being “invisible in the room” had sons who wanted to be anything but invisible. As Sidney Poitier said to Roy Glenn in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” in 1967, “Dad, you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man.”
There are some awkward moments in trying to get through so much material so quickly, with just brief glimpses of some of the Presidents and some of the events. By the time we figure out that it is Robin Williams playing President Eisenhower, painting a landscape as Cecil serves him from a silver tray, his appearance is over. John Cusack has two juicy scenes as Richard Nixon. As the eager, if socially clumsy Vice President, he visits the kitchen to hand out buttons and ask the staff what issues are important to them. “As members of the Negro race,” he intones, as though they do not know who they are, “what are your biggest concerns?”
Later, Cecil sees the President unraveling under the impeachment proceedings. James Marsden has some of President Kennedy’s charisma, and Minka Kelly is lovely and utterly heartbreaking as Jackie, sobbing in the pink suit covered with blood that she could not bring herself to remove. Liev Schreiber shows us President Johnson’s swagger, leaving the bathroom door open so he can talk to his aides while he is on the toilet. Presidents Carter and Ford are seen only in brief archival footage, but Alan Rickman and Jane Fonda are both excellent as the Reagans, shown with more warmth and humanity than the caricatures we might expect.
This cavalcade of star power is just the frame. Director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong (Danny Siegel on “Mad Men”) put the human story at the center of the tumultuous historic changes from the late 1950’s to the first decade of the 21st century. That gets a little didactic and clumsy. Cecil Gaines is given two sons, Louis (David Oyelowo of “Red Tails”) and Charlie (Elijah Kelley of “Hairspray”), so that Louis can become involved in the Civil Rights movement, from sit-ins to freedom rides, and then the Black Panthers and anti-apartheid, while Charlie goes to fight in Vietnam. But sensitive and heartfelt performances and the ultimate recognition by the characters that despite their estrangement, the connection between Cecil and Louis is powerful and unbreakable makes their reconciliation hit home. There is a distracting and unnecessary detour into the relationship between Cecil’s wife, Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) and a neighbor (Terrence Howard). And the cameos by big stars as the Presidents are distracting — and a grim reminder that even powerhouses like Winfrey, Whitaker, and Daniels and a relatively modest budget were not enough to get a Hollywood greenlight without some white stars. Some of the best scenes are when we see the African-American characters away from the “other face” they have to show whites, relaxed and joking in the White House locker room (Cuba Gooding, Jr. Lenny Kravitz) and or at neighborhood parties.
Ultimately, this is Cecil’s story. When he was a child, service was a chance to get out of the cotton field. In his first job away from the plantation, he learns to present a pleasant, respectful, and helpful face to the customers, to “make them feel not threatened,” to look at them only to “see what they need.” And he learns to stop using the n-word about himself or anyone else. When he comes to the White House, he is told, “You hear nothing. You see nothing. You only serve.” As for the issues, when it comes to the staff, “We have no tolerance for politics at the White House.”
While Louis and his friends are staging a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter, his father is serving dignitaries, wearing white gloves and a tuxedo. But all the courage and determination Louis shows in his passionate commitment to equality don’t reach the power of the moments when Cecil challenges the long-standing tradition of paying the African-American staff of the White House 40 percent less than the white staff, and not allowing them the opportunity for promotion.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness,” the movie’s opening epigraph from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King tells us. “Only light can do that.”
Parents should know that this film includes strong language, drinking, drunkenness, and alcohol abuse, sad deaths, peril and violence including police brutality, rape, murder, lynching, racial epithets, sexual references and non-explicit situations.
Family discussion: Talk to members of your family about their own experiences before and during the Civil Rights era and read about some of the people and incidents mentioned in this movie, including Emmett Till, Pablo Casals, and James Lawson.
. 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.
, “Eyes on the Prize,” and “The Remains of the Day” and the books 
and 