Posted on November 23, 2009 at 1:12 pm
A girl makes a Thanksgiving meal for her estranged family in this bittersweet indie film filled with unforgettable characters. It is available this week only at no charge on Hulu.
Posted on November 21, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Spoiler alert: My pal Jen Yamoto has put together a great list of differences/improvements comparing Stephanie Meyers’ book, New Moon, and the movie.
Posted on November 16, 2009 at 12:00 pm
I love Ellen’s interview with Gabourey Sidibe, who plays the title character in “Precious.” Director Lee Daniels told the New York Times he knew it would be difficult to find an actress to play the role of an abused pregnant teenager who weighed 350 pounds.
“I couldn’t call Hollywood and say, ‘Send over all your 300-pound black girls,’ ” Daniels explained. “They’d laugh”….Daniels saw 500 girls, including one of his nieces. Ten finalists, none of whom had ever acted before, were put through an aspiring-thespian “boot camp.” “It was kind of like ‘American Idol,’ ” Daniels said. “But I still wasn’t happy. We were weeks away from filming, and I still hadn’t found Precious.”
But when he met Sidibe, he knew he’d found his star.
Unlike Precious, Sidibe is well spoken and cheerful. “I’m not her,” Sidibe said emphatically. “But, when I was 14 or 15, I saw myself in a different way. Back then, I envied a life that I’d made up in my mind. I broke free of that unhappiness and I decided to change — I was going to be happy with myself. No matter what I look like, no matter what people think.” Daniels realized that Sidibe’s attitude was crucial to playing Precious.
In this interview, Sidibe talks about how the love she shared with Mo’Nique helped them get through the most brutal of the movie’s abuse scenes. It is a thrill to witness this talented young woman’s confidence and joy. Like Ellen, I want her to stay just who she is.
Posted on November 8, 2009 at 8:06 pm
I loved “Donnie Darko” and was eager to listen to the DVD commentary by writer/director Richard Kelly. But I had to turn it off after the first ten minutes. Kelly explained too much, and his explanations were so mundane they detracted from the film’s intriguing ambiguities. After the fascinating but incoherent “Southland Tales,” Kelly shifts back toward explaining too much in “The Box, based on a short story by Richard Matheson and its adaptation as an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”
Amid the meticulously re-created details of the 1976 Richmond, Virginia setting (harvest gold, maxi coats), a loving couple feeling some financial pressure are presented with a moral dilemma. Early one morning just before Christmas, a plain brown package is left on their doorstep with an elegant note informing them that Mr. Steward (Frank Langella) will be there at 5. Inside the package is a box with a red button covered by a locked glass dome.
Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) go to work, where each receives bad news. Norma teaches English at a private school. Just after her class on Sartre’s “No Exit,” she is informed that the school will no longer be able to subsidize her son’s tuition, a severe financial blow. And Arthur, who (like Kelly’s father) designs lenses for a Mars explorer, learns that his application to the astronaut program has been turned down.
Norma is home alone when Mr. Steward arrives. His appearance is shocking. The lower left quarter of his face has been sheered off by some massive trauma, so devastating we can see not only sinew but teeth through what once was his cheek. His message is shocking, too. He gives Norma a key to open the glass dome and tells her that if she pushes the red button within 24 hours someone she does not know will die and she will receive one million dollars in cash, tax-free.
“Maybe it’s a baby,” says Arthur. “Maybe it’s a man on death row,” says Norma. Arthur, the engineer, takes the box apart. There’s nothing inside. Rationally, it seems impossible that the offer could be real. They go back and forth. And then, as much to end the agony of uncertainty as anything else, one of them impulsively hits it. And then things really go haywire in the lives of Arthur and Norma and pretty much in the movie, too.
Kelly knows how to create a mood of claustrophobic dread and how to create stunning images. Back in those pre-Google days, people had to do research in the stacks of a library, and Kelly makes those scenes look both retro and chilling. But there is nothing to approach the best moments in “Donnie Darko,” the Sparkle Motion dance number to “Notorious,” the motivational speaker, the controversy over the story taught in school, the riff on the Smurfs. Like the box with the button, it is enticing on the surface but inside it is empty.
Posted on November 2, 2009 at 8:00 am
B+| Lowest Recommended Age: | Middle School |
| MPAA Rating: | PG |
| Profanity: | None |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | None |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Some sad moments |
| Diversity Issues: | A theme of the movie, including anti-semitism and racism |
| Date Released to Theaters: | 1998 |
| Date Released to DVD: | 1998 |
| Amazon.com ASIN: | B00005NTOI |
In honor of the World Series, take a look at this documentary about baseball star Hank Greenberg.
Brilliant documentary-maker Aviva Kempner has created a gem of a movie to lift the spirit of anyone who cares about baseball — or heroes.
Hank Greenberg was that rarest of sports stars, someone who was as good as his fans hoped he was — in fact, he was even better. Over and over, in this movie, we see accomplished, distinguished men get teary-eyed as they talk about how much Hank Greenberg meant to them when they were growing up. Senator Carl Levin said, “Because he was a hero, I was a little bit of a hero, too.” Lawyer-to-the-stars Alan Dershowitz says, “Baseball was our way of showing that we were as American as anyone else.”
“We” meant Jews. Hank Greenberg was not the first Jewish baseball player, but he was the first one to be proudly Jewish. He did not change his name and he did not hide his religion. He missed a day of the World Series to observe Yom Kippur (though he did play on Rosh Hashanah, thanks to a clearance from a rabbi who was a baseball fan). And he was a star. Dershowitz said, “He was what they said Jews could never be.”
Kempner combines stock footage and contemporary interviews with fans, friends, family, and teammates to give a glowing portrait of Greenberg, who died in 1986, and, as the title promises, of his era.
Greenberg faced a lot of prejudice. He played for the Detroit Tigers in a city whose leading citizen, Henry Ford, was a virulent anti-Semite. One of his teammates was a country boy who had never met a Jew before and literally expected Greenberg to have horns. But Greenberg never took it personally and never became bitter. He said that it made him work harder because if he failed, “I wasn’t a bum; I was a Jewish bum.” Not a religious or observant man, he was very aware of his role as a symbol, and, as a fan notes, “he wore his Jewishness on his sleeve and in his heart.” At the end of his career, he helped support another baseball player he perhaps understood better than anyone — Jackie Robinson.
Greenberg missed four seasons at the top of his career because he was serving in WWII. And at the end of his career he was impulsively traded by an owner who mistakenly thought he was thinking of leaving. He spoke of those incidents with regret, but without anger. One of the great treats of this movie is see not just how well Greenberg handled adversity, but how well he handled fame and success, remaining humble, honest, and dedicated through it all.
Perhaps most revealing of Greenberg’s character was the one statistic that he cared about, in this most statistic-ridden of sports — RBIs. He loved being the one who batted clean-up, “the guy that comes up at the clutch, changes the ball game, makes all the difference.” He could have gone for the home run record, but he was the ultimate team player.
His teammates and friends talk, also, about his dedication. He was the hardest-working of ball-players, paying anyone he could find to pitch to him for extra batting practice and even stripping down in a friend’s dress-making studio so he could examine his batting stance in a three-way mirror.
Parents should know that while younger kids might not understand the movie, there is nothing objectionable in it — and how many of today’s sports figures could inspire a documentary about which that statement could be made?
Families who see this movie should talk about America’s history of prejudice and about the different ways that people handle adversity — and success. Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Ken Burns’ “Baseball” documentary, broadcast on PBS and available on video.
