The King’s Speech

Posted on April 18, 2011 at 8:00 am

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Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language
Profanity:	One brief scene with profanity used as a vocal exercise
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	Class difference
Date Released to Theaters:	December 17, 2010

One of the best movies of the year makes a king look like an underdog in the true story of a man who had to literally and metaphorically find his voice, with in a very real sense the fate of the world depending on it.
It wasn’t because she didn’t love him, she explains, when she turned down his proposal of marriage twice. It was because he was a prince, a member of the British royal family, and she did not want to live a public life. And then she remembered that she did love him. And that he had a stammer, so she concluded that would keep him on the sidelines. And then she married him, and they had two children. And then he became king.
The Duke of York (Colin Firth), known as Bertie to his family, was an almost-ideal second son in the royal family. He served honorably in the military and took his public duties seriously. He had no interest his brother David’s position as the heir to the throne. But then three things happened. First, radio was invented, and all of a sudden a dignified wave was not enough. For the first time, all of Great Britain (encompassing, at that time, one quarter of the developed world) could hear the voice of their leaders. Second, Hitler’s aggression was making war inevitable.
And third, Bertie’s brother David, by then King Edward VIII, would shatter precedent and become the first ruler in British history to resign, in royal terms, to abdicate, so that he would be free to marry an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson. Just at the moment when the British people most needed to hear their king, they had a king who could not TIFF-Kings-Speech-colin_firth_helena_bonham_carter_kings_speech4.jpg speak.
The best doctors had been consulted, and Bertie had been subjected to treatment that literally went back to Demosthenes. And then the Duchess brought him to Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian actor who had worked with the shell-shocked veterans of WWI. As an actor, he knew breathing techniques and other exercises to help make the spoken word smooth and compelling. And his work with the veterans showed him that the relationship between the therapist and the stutterer — and sometimes the opportunity to talk about the stutterer’s experiences and fears — could be very important.
And so Bertie has, for the first time ever, conversations with someone outside his family. He desperately wants to maintain his dignity, but he even more desperately wants to be able to play this increasingly more crucial role.
The movie may be sepia tones and British accents but it is not at all stuffy thanks to Firth, Rush and Helena Bonham Carter as his wife. Firth shows us Bertie’s struggles to locate his voice and define his role. In one scene, when he tells his little girls (including the current Queen Elizabeth) a bedtime story, it is almost unbearably touching because it means so much to him and the story is so self-deprecatory and loving. People who have trouble speaking spend a lot of time listening and observing. Bertie watches his father and brother with deference, a need for approval, and also a thoughtful evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses as though he is measuring them as a way of creating himself.
The heart of the film is Bertie’s meetings with Lionel, and they are a marvel. Screenwriter David Seidler, himself a one-time stutterer whose uncle was treated by Lionel, worked on the screenplay for decades (the Queen Mother asked that it not be produced until after her death), and it is a masterwork that merits all that went into it. At age 72, Seidler knows what it is to find one’s voice.

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Inside Job

Posted on March 7, 2011 at 8:00 am

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Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some drug and sex-related material
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Reference to drug use with some images
Violence/ Scariness:	True story of betrayal and corruption
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	October 22, 2010
Date Released to DVD:	March 8, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0041KKYBA

Americans are generous in need and forgiving of mistakes. But we are outraged by injustice. This indispensable film shows us the who, what, when, where, and how of the financial crisis, finally placing it in the context it requires — a failure of decency, fairness, accountability, and honor. Even for those who want to put a pillow over their head when they hear terms like “credit default swap” and those whose eyes glaze over at the thought of watching a hearing on C SPAN will find this movie, the 2011 Oscar-winner for best documentary, a mesmerizing saga of corruption and greed, the biggest heist story of all time, and sadly, all too true.

Charles Ferguson (“No End in Sight”) is now at the front rank not just of documentarians but of film-makers, investigative journalists, and participants in the public policy debates. He begins with the story of what happened in Iceland, which went from one of the world’s most stable economies to bankruptcy almost overnight following deregulation. Its GDP was $13 billion; its debt was $100 billion. Still, at first this seems like an odd choice, but it quickly becomes clear that Iceland illustrates the same mistakes, oversights, bungles, and corruption that led to our own financial catastrophe. And by the final chapter of the film, it comes up again in a stunning interview. A flustered academic has to explain why a paper he once wrote about the financial stability of Iceland (without disclosing his financial arrangement with the people behind the deregulation) is now listed on his c.v. as being about Iceland’s instability. His explanation? It must be a typo.

This chilling absence of any sense of honor or shame or responsibility pervades the film. This is the story of “massive private gains and public loss.” Ferguson points out that this is just the most recent in a series of financial crises, each one causing more damage while the industry made more money. He describes the “great big global Ponzi scheme.” And he names names and shows us the faces of the people involved. He makes leverage, securitization, and yes, credit default swaps as fascinating as the Empire’s plans for the Death Star. And he points out that in the 21st century, it is financial instruments that are the real weapons of mass destruction.

Interview: Charles Ferguson of ‘Inside Job’

Posted on October 20, 2010 at 8:00 am

The scariest — and most infuriating — movie of the year is “Inside Job,” the documentary about the financial meltdown from Charles Ferguson, the director of “No End in Sight.” With just two films, Ferguson, a PhD in political science who made a fortune in software, has become an extraordinarily accomplished director and journalist and an important participant in the conversation about definitional issues of policy. His films are exceptionally well-crafted. He has a true story-teller’s understanding of the material and, as his interviews of the friendly and not-so-friendly subjects of this film demonstrate, a fearless intellect and a gift for getting to the point — all of which made interviewing him a rare treat.

I have done a great deal of research myself on the subprime portion of the financial meltdown and I believe a core problem was that everyone at every stage of the Wall Street conveyor belt, had incentive compensation that was all upside and no downside — they all got paid for success with no risk of loss for failure. Is that what you discovered as well?

These people were rewarded enormously for doing the dangerous things they did and even on a net basis, despite the losses they suffered when their firms collapsed, they made more money then they would have if they behaved ethically. Harvard Law School professor Lucien Bebchuk’s study on executive compensation at Bear Stearns showed that it created incentives for excess risk.

I think it’s unquestionably correct at several different stages and several different levels in the system, beginning with the yield-spread premiums that lenders paid to mortgage brokers which incented mortgage brokers to put people in more expensive and more dangerous loans than they should have going all the way up to the structure of trader and sales and CEO compensation in investment banking, which are all exceptionally dangerous and give people huge incentives to take risks and/or commit fraud, both of which occurred on a gigantic scale. Even the nature of director compensation and corporate governance — the directors are essentially paid to be passive and to not challenge entrenched management.

How would you describe what went wrong?

Large-scale fraud became a core part of the financial system — a combination of deregulation and lack of enforcement of the law.

One of the big differences between the financial crises of the Enron/WorldCom era and the more recent one is that no one seems to be going to jail. Why is that?

The reason that they’re not going to jail is not that they didn’t commit crimes. It’s because there’s been no effort to enforce the law, an even more disturbing phenomenon.

What’s the solution?

The American people have to get angry enough and organized enough to force our political leaders to change. At the moment it doesn’t seem at all likely that it’s going to come from the current administration. It’s been a great disappointment that it’s turned out to be more of the same. And so far the American people have been remarkably quiescent in the face of this, given what’s occurred. I hope that that’s changing. There are good guys but they’re not organized. There’s no Chamber of Commerce for the good guys. That’s what we need, whether it’s a political party or some non-profit/lobbying organization that coordinates — there are a number of organizations but they are very scattered and divided.

How can Washington stand up to Wall Street, given the amount of money they spend on lobbying and campaign contributions?

Wall Street has certainly become very powerful. It’s depressingly the case that politicians are inexpensive to purchase. Three things are critical — changing the role that money plays in elections, paying regulators very well, which some countries do, like Singapore, which gives them no financial incentive to move to or give favors to the private sector, and third is law enforcement. One of the least well covered in media terms developments related to this is the politicization of law enforcement for white collar crimes.

As they say, if you rob a bank with a gun, you go to jail; if you rob a bank with a pen, you get to keep your job and your bonus.

And that’s a change. After the S&L crisis, many people went to jail. Now no one goes to jail.

Who should have gone to jail?

All of the major investment banks artificially concealed their liabilities, most of them inflated the value of their assets for quite a long period of time. We also know all the major investment banks were heavily involved in selling securities they knew to be defective and in many cases designing them to fail so they could bet against them or allow their clients to bet against them. In principle it’s possible to do those things without violating the law but as a practical matter it’s hard to sell hundreds of billions of dollars of those securities without committing fraud. If you’re honest and you don’t lie and you don’t commit fraud, it’s a tough sell. We know that Goldman Sachs executives were referring to these as “s***y deals” at the same time that they were selling them as very safe securities. I suspect that a very high fraction of the senior sales forces, the senior people on the mortgage tests, the senior mortgage traders, the senior management of the investment banking industry should be prosecuted.

What is the hardest part of explaining all of this to frustrated and angry Americans, where so many people feel that the system is unfair but whose eyes glaze over when they hear “credit default swaps?” How do you reach the people you want to get angry?

Keeping the jargon out and getting to the essence of things, not letting the jargon overwhelm you. We wanted to make the film interesting and accessible for the average person. We used good cinematography, cool images, great music, pacing, to make it appeal to the audience. I hope that many, many people will see this film.

You were a serious film fan before you became a film-maker. What are some of your favorites?

There are serious ones and silly ones. I love film noir, “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Big Sleep,” the newer incarnations like “LA Confidential.” I love heist movies. “Inside Man” I thought was great. And serious things, too: “Kagimusha,” “Ran.” My friend Jason Kohn’s movie “Manda Bala” about corruption in Brazil is beautiful, amazing. It’s about crime and corruption in Brazil and it’s gorgeous, really extraordinary. It’s so unusual in the way that it is visually gorgeous. It was made in anamorphic Super 16, 2.7 to 1 so a standard DVD will not do it justice. It’s really breathtaking.

Are documentaries the agent for social change the way Dickens was in the late 19th century and journalists like Upton Sinclair and Rachel Carson were in the 20th century?

It’s not the only place investigative journalism gets done these days but journalism is shrinking, and under a lot of pressure. Documentary film is taking up some of that slack and I hope it will become increasingly prominent.

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Directors Documentary Interview

The Blind Side

Posted on March 22, 2010 at 8:00 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for one scene involving brief violence, drug and sexual references
Profanity:	Mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Character abuses drugs, social drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Gun violence and some peril, car accident
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	November 20, 2009
Date Released to DVD:	March 23, 2010
Amazon.com ASIN:	B002VECM6S

“The Blind Side” is a movie about football that had its own broken field running challenge. It is the true story of Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman Michael Oher, a homeless black kid adopted by a wealthy white family. So, it could so easily have been syrupy, or condescending, or downright offensive. At worst, it could have been a cross between the Hallmark channel and “Diff’rent Strokes.”

There have been too many “magical Negro” characters in movies, the non-white character whose role in the story is to give some white people a spiritual or ennobling experience. And there have been too many of what my friend Tim Gordon calls “mighty whitey” movies, where some needy non-white person is helped by some saintly white person. And there have been way too many movies where someone says, with a catch in his or her throat, that “he helped me more than I could ever have helped him.” This movie risks failing in all three of these categories and somehow it manages to deftly come together to make the story genuinely touching. You may find yourself with a catch in your throat, not to mention a tear in your eye.

It helps that the story is true. The wealthy Touhey family did take in and then adopt a homeless black teenager whose life had been so chaotic that there was almost no record of his existence. He happened to go along with a friend who was applying to a private school on an athletic scholarship and was seen by the coach who recognized his ability. He is enormous and he is fast, both valuable in an offensive lineman. And this happened at just the time that the role of the offensive lineman was becoming one of the most critical positions on the team. Leigh Anne Touhy (Sandra Bullock, in her Oscar-winning performance) explains at the beginning of the film, based on the Michael Lewis book of the same name, that New York Giants lineman Lawrence Taylor changed the game. He went after quarterbacks like the Washington Redskins’ Joe Theismann, who received a career-ending injury because Taylor came after him in his blind spot. Hence the increased focus on protecting the quarterback, and that is the job for which Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) seems to have been designed.

It isn’t just that his is very big and very fast. It is another quality, the one that was identified when he was given a battery of tests as the only stand-out ability in a long list of failures. Tests showed that he had an extraordinary level of protective instinct and experience showed that he had an extraordinary ability as well.

She was never tested, but Leigh Anne is probably off the charts for protective instinct as well. It is this quality they share that makes us believe in their connection.

And it is another of Leigh Anne’s qualities that keeps the story from getting too sugary. She is kind of obnoxious. Girl-next-door Sandra Bullock shows us Leigh Anne’s determination and passionate dedication to her family and her ideals and makes us understand that she has a bit of a sense of humor about herself. When she has to admit her husband was right about something, she also concedes that the words taste like vinegar. She has no problem telling pretty much everyone from her condescending friends to the high school coach what they should do. But it is her vinegary spirit that makes the situation and the movie work. She does not cry over Oher’s trials and she does not act like he is her St. Bernhard puppy. She is just someone who has a strong sense of justice fueled by her faith, a quality too rarely portrayed in the media. And she has that protective instinct. Oher is not the usual gentle giant, which helps as well. He has a sense of humor and self-respect that makes clear that he is a full partner in becoming a member of the family, giving as much as he gets.

So this movie is smarter than it had to be, which gives its emotional core even more of punch. You’ve seen the highlights in the trailer. But the quiet moments in between and lovely performances by Bullock, Aaron, and Tim McGraw as Leigh Anne’s husband make this one of the best family films of the year.

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

Posted on March 12, 2010 at 3:57 pm

Claireece (newcomer Gabourey ‘Gabby’ Sidibe) is a 16-year-old, still in middle school, illiterate, pregnant with her second child. The first baby has Down Syndrome. Both pregnancies are the result of rape by her own father. She is subjected to constant physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and has retreated so far inside herself that she barely exists in the world. And in a cruel parody of tenderness, she is called by her middle name, “Precious.” In a cruel demonstration of the constrictions of her world, Precious knew no other name to give her Down Syndrome child than “Mongo.”

Inside 350 pounds of weight, a moat of flesh, her wall against the world, Precious hides as far from everyone as she can go. She has little wisps of dreams cobbled together from television, a light-skinned boyfriend, a stroll down a red carpet, surrounded by cameras and adoring fans. But she is so limited in experience and opportunity that she literally cannot imagine a genuine alternative to what she has. She does not even know what the word “alternative” means. When the middle school principal arranges for her to attend a special “each one teach one” alternative school, someone has to explain to her what an alternative is. It is, a distracted administrator tells her, “a different way of doing.” And it is that recognition, more than the program itself, just the realization that there are different ways of doing, that leads her to understand that there may be choices available to her.

Seeing Precious understand for the first time that she is worthy of love and capable of learning is the expected pleasure of this movie. But it is also the challenge of the film. Even slightly toned down from the novel, by poet and teacher Sapphire, the abuse is so relentless, so outrageous, even beyond the usual struggles we see in fiction and on the talk shows and tabloid covers.

They thrive on exploitative confessions, a secularized testimony that tries to disinfect the prurient pleasures of wallowing in degradation and tragedy with the superficial pieties of simplistic redemption. The post-production sign-on of Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry as producers, both survivors of abuse and highly successful purveyors of abuse melodrama, is a sign to be wary. And even with a sensitive performance by Sidibe, this film would risk falling into that trap of easy sentimentality. That it does not is due to one character and one actress, comedienne Mo’Nique in her Oscar-winning, fearless portrayal of the mother, a monster named, with grim irony, Mary.

Two key scenes in the film focus on Mary’s interactions with social workers. In the first, like a theatrical director, she barks out orders to set the stage for a visit, casting herself in the role of a loving grandmother, to persuade the social worker that she is doing everything necessary to qualify for welfare payments for her extended family. Where moments before she seemed completely out of control, wavering back and forth between stupor and rage, when she has to pull it together, she does, slapping on a wig and cuddling the baby. The instant the door shuts, the monster returns.

And then, near the end, in another meeting with another social worker (beautifully underplayed by pop diva Mariah Carey), Mary starts to talk and for the first time we see her as the victim as well as the inflicter of damage. In a monologue she seems to forget where she is and who she wants to appear to be and opens herself up in a moment so raw, so naked, so vulnerable that it takes the entire film to a different level.

Director Lee Daniels, like his producers Winfrey and Perry, brings a sincerity to telling these stories that tempers the potential for exploitation. He has a sure, if unconventional, eye for casting. In addition to Mo’Nique and Carey, he gets small jewels of performances from talk-show and sit-com star Sherry Shepherd as the alternative school administrator and musician Lenny Kravitz as a sympathetic nurse. The lovely Paula Patton brings understated grace to the role of the alternative teacher, and the assortment of young performers who play the classmates at Each One Teach One manage to avoid the “Welcome Back Kotter” syndrome and evoke full characters. But Mo’Nique’s fierce and fearless performance as Mary holds the story together and takes it to another level. She does not let us hate her because she does not let us compartmentalize her. By opening herself up on screen, she forces us to look into the source of her damaged heart. And that moment, more than any other, shows us what Precious has had to overcome.

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Based on a book Drama Family Issues