Beliefnet’s Movies about Faith in Love

Posted on October 29, 2008 at 4:00 pm

Idol Chatter has a great post with a list of the best movies about putting your faith in love (and cry in the process). I don’t agree with all of the choices — I find “The Other Sister” and “Stepmom” manipulative and maudlin and while I know “The Notebook” has zillions of passionate fans, it never moved me as much as I wanted it to. But I love the idea of this list and have a few movies to add:

1. “Truly, Madly, Deeply” One of the greatest films ever about love and loss with heart-wrenching performances by Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman.

2. “Brief Encounter” A woman who thinks she is perfectly content with her life finds that she is capable of a deeper love — and a more painful sense of loss — than she ever imagined. See also the underrated “Falling in Love” with Meryl Streep and Robert DeNiro.

3. “Sophie’s Choice” Loving someone cannot save them. Streep and Kevin Kline. Get out your hankies.

4. “An Affair to Remember” Watch the shipboard romance and skip through the kids singing but don’t miss that final scene, when Cary Grant finds out why Deborah Kerr wasn’t waiting for him on top of the Empire State Building.

5. “Dark Victory” Bette Davis is a headstrong party girl who finds love with the doctor when it is almost too late. See also “Now Voyager,” where Davis tells the man she loves but cannot be with not to ask for the moon because they have the stars.

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For Your Netflix Queue Lists

Economic Crisis and the Movies

Posted on October 25, 2008 at 2:59 pm

Hundreds of news articles are referring to our current economic crisis as the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Movies were just coming of age in that decade. The first talkie was “The Jazz Singer” in 1927 and the first three-strip Technicolor film was “Becky Sharp” in 1935. So the first big contemporary story told in movies was about the Depression and films as varied as Meet John Doe, Swing Time, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Grapes of Wrath, Sullivan’s Travels, Gold Diggers of 1933, Modern Times, and The Poor Little Rich Girl with Shirley Temple, the Depression era’s top box office star, both reflected and influenced their time.

In The Guardian, David Thomson writes about the classic films of the 30’s and his pessimism that the current economic struggles will produce anything as enduring.

In 1930, the talent in American pictures was from literature, the theatre and journalism, with educated backgrounds and a shared sense of the moral identity in being American. Today’s talent consists of absurdly rich young people who have made the hits of the past dozen years. They know very little about life, except what they have to lose. Those people and much of the audience have lost the habit, or even the memory, of hard times.

While we might not see anything like Ginger Rogers singing “We’re in the Money” in pig latin during the recovery from this economic upheaval, history has shown that the toughest times most often produce the greatest art. Furthermore, just as technology transformed the movies of the 1930’s, changes that it possible for people to create and distribute movies outside the studio system are opening up the chance to share stories and ideas to a much broader range of people from a much broader range of backgrounds than was possible 80 years ago. I look forward to seeing what hardship inspires. And in the meantime, we can still enjoy Ginger singing about how she’s in-way the oney-may.

Black Stars and Box Office

Posted on October 24, 2008 at 10:00 am

Two thoughtful and provocative articles bookend one of most challenging questions in American culture — the role of race at the collision point of art and commerce. In The Washington Post, Neely Tucker writes about Stars on the Field but Shared Glory on Film — the way that biopics about African-American sports stars always seem to end up being about the relationship of the athletes to their white mentor/competitors. The classic Brian’s Song
was based on the memoir of Gale Sayers. But the movie pushed him to the sidelines — even the title was a reference to his teammate, Brian Piccolo, and the impact his death had on Sayers. The current release, The Express, like many films ostensibly about minority characters, spends as much or more time on a white character (the coach played by Dennis Quaid).

In the Washington Post, Tucker talks about the evolution of the minority in sports movie:

By the 1990s, the prevailing idea on screen about black athletes was mostly downbeat. It was about exploitation of vulnerable young black men to play for rich white colleges or pro teams; it was about white corruption and greed. There was a steady stream of these: “Above the Rim,” “Blue Chips,” “He Got Game” and the superb documentary “Hoop Dreams.”

But the interracial harmony story line began percolating in “The Hurricane,” in 1999, which featured an embittered black athlete and criminal turning toward the light. And in 2000 came Disney’s “Remember the Titans.”

It starred Denzel Washington as Boone at T.C. Williams High, taking over and integrating the team in 1971. In real life, the team played other integrated teams and roared to an undefeated, rarely-scored-upon state title. In the film, they play against all-white teams and Washington’s character withstands racist referees, school boosters and team mutinies to win the championship on a last-second, miracle play.

After “Titans,” which took in $115 million at the U.S. box office, more studios adopted the same formula: Revisit the civil rights era through a feel-good sports epic, based on a true story. Have some clearly identified white racists, some good white folks and a black hero, who is possessed of a greater morality, patience and ability. Show the whites helping in key moments, either with bureaucracy or running interference against racists. In the final reel, have the white and black main characters as close friends.

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Quiz: High School Musicals

Posted on October 21, 2008 at 8:00 am

In honor of HSM3, test your memory of musicals with high school settings:

1. What number is on Troy’s basketball uniform?

2. What is the name of the high school musical they perform in the first movie?

3. What 1978 high school movie musical set in the 1950’s featured real-life 50’s star Eve Arden?

4. What 1963 high school musical begins with a song where teenagers calling each other to talk/sing about about a couple going steady?

5. Who was the “Rock and Roll High School” named after?

6. What rock group was the favorite of the kids in “Rock and Roll High School?”

7. Which popular high school musical has been filmed twice?

8. What musical was about teenagers who wanted to have a dance in a town where rock music was banned?

9. Which superstar duo appeared in several different movies as teenagers who put on musical shows?

10. Which movie with a best-selling and Oscar-winning title song was set in a high school where music and dance were at the heart of the curriculum?

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Musical Quiz

Alan Klavan’s ‘Liberal Myths’ in and About Movies

Posted on October 19, 2008 at 8:00 am

Writer Alan Klavan calls Hollywood movies liberal propaganda in a provocative opinion piece in the Washington Post.
For the past 30 years or so, Hollywood storytelling has been guided by a liberal mythos in which, for example, blacklisting communist screenwriters during the ’50s was somehow morally worse than fellow-traveling with the Stalinist murderers of tens of millions (“Trumbo”); Che Guevara was a dashing, romantic liberator instead of a charismatic killer (“The Motorcycle Diaries”); and the worldwide violence currently being waged by Islamo-fascists is either a figment of our bigoted imaginations or the product of our evil deeds (“V for Vendetta“).

Hollywood moviemakers, in other words, have been telling lies — loudly, constantly and almost always in support of a left-wing point of view. And these lies are most prolific and tenacious when the Hollywood left is lying about itself.
This seems over the top to me. “The Motorcyle Diaries” was about Che Guevara’s early, idealistic years, as though it was a prequel to “The Godfather” that just focused on the time between the night Michael enlisted and the wedding scene that begins the film. Unless Klavan wants to insist that Guevara was intentionally and inherently evil in his twenties, it seems to me part of what makes the movie so intriguing is our knowledge of what he became when the injustice that troubles him so deeply in this film persuades him that the ends justify the means and he loses his ability to resist the corruption of power. And “V for Vendetta” is an allegory that is intended to be open-ended so that it can be interpreted in several ways. The movie begins with a reference to Guy Fawkes, whose foiled 1605 attempt to bomb Parliament is still celebrated every year. And it specifically raises the questions about whether the main characters can be seen as terrorists or as revolutionaries — or both — and how to respond to fascism without becoming fascistic.
He does make some good points:
But Hollywood supports unions, a stalwart Democratic cause, right? Well, yeah, if you watch “Norma Rae” or “Hoffa.” But in real life, filmmakers routinely outsource their productions to places such as Vancouver and Budapest, where they can avoid paying union premiums. And when the Writers Guild struck last year, we saw studio liberals turn into corporate hard-guys in the blink of an eye.
I would not say that “Hoffa” is a valentine to unions, but Klavan’s accusation of hypocrisy is well-founded, especially when it comes to the writer’s strike, and I am delighted to see someone who is politically conservative speak out on behalf of unions.
However, he makes an enormous mistake by characterizing the new Oliver Stone movie about President Bush, “W.,” without having seen it, based only on the trailers and advance work. A screenwriter should know better.
And his accusation that liberals are not patriotic is hogwash. He says,
The meaning of the word patriotism is “love of country.” If you don’t love your country, you’re not a patriot.
Liberals love America every bit as much as conservatives do, and it is shameful of Klevan to suggest otherwise. Loving America means wanting it to live up to its ideals, ideal of democracy and freedom that transformed the world. The first principle of the founding fathers was their commitment to challenge, even revolution, to keep the country vibrant and constantly renewing itself. In a moment when opposing political candidates are both running on a platform of change, Klavan should realize that we can best show our love for our country by renewing its commitment to the values at its foundation, those same values of freedom of speech that gave him his space in a “liberal” newspaper.