Bread and Tulips 2000
116 minutes If only the Italians
would make more movies! An unhappy
housewife who is taken for granted by her philandering husband hitchhikes to
Venice and makes a new life for herself working in a florist shop and living in
a room let by a suicidal waiter played by Bruno Ganz. Her best new friend besides Ganz is the massage
therapist who lives and works in the room next to hers. Her husband hires a new plumber for his
bathroom remodeling business and sends him to Venice to try to find his
wife. It’s all about lower middle class
life in Italy and it’s all delightful comedy
Come See the Paradise 1990
138 minutes I was intrigued by
the idea of a film about an interracial marriage like mine before WW II. An Irish American labor organizer falls in
love with a second generation (Nisei) Japanese woman in Los Angeles in about
1936. They move to Oregon where it is
legal for them to get married and try to make a life there. Eventually they separate when he is arrested
in a labor demonstration. She returns to
her family in LA just in time to be swept up in the turmoil of the early days
of WW II. This has to be the best
dramatization I have seen of the brutality and injustice of the internment of
Japanese Americans during the war. They
were in those stables for two months and the concentration camps they were they
sent to weren’t much better until they improved them themselves.
Freedom Writers 2007
122 minutes This is
one of the best movies nobody will see.
I put it in my queue because it has Hilary Swank. It’s the true story of how Erin Gruell, a beginning
teacher, white and Ivy League trained, bonded with a multi-racial freshman high
school class in which no one was expected to graduate and persuaded the members
of the various racial groups, Hispanic, African[-American, Cambodian, Chinese
and one white guy, to bond with each other.
There were gang issues and every other kind of issue, and she managed to
overcome them all. She gave each of them
a journal and required them to write something every day. Eventually these became a book published in
the late 1990s. Among the things she
used to reach them was the Holocaust, which helped her persuade them that their
hardships were not unique and that they had a future. Her students took the initiative to raise
the money to bring the woman who hid Anne Frank to LA to speak to them. Her first two years with the class were so
successful, including test scores, that she was able to get permission to stay
with them through the whole four years to graduation. If you get the disk, look at the bonus
features. Some of the deleted scenes are
fabulous. It must have hurt to cut them.
And Hilary Swank found herself bonding with the young actors in the movie in
much the same way that Erin Gruell bonded with her class.
Harrison’s Flowers 2000
122 minutes Sarah is a happily
married photo editor for Newsweek. Her husband, Harrison Lloyd, is a Pulitzer
Prize-winning photojournalist, who is having second thoughts about covering the
world’s hotspots. He reluctantly accepts
one last assignment to cover the war in Croatia. Sarah gets word that he has been killed but
refuses to accept that he is dead and goes herself to Croatia to find him. She does, but he is badly damaged and it is
more than a year after his return before he even knows who she is. End of story, end of review, except that the
real movie here is the horror of ethnic cleansing. I have never seen a more dramatic and
horrifying depiction of war close up, evil and nasty. I was just watching this on a 42” TV with no
special sound system and the special effects had me jumping out of my
seat. The “flowers” were in Harrison’s
greenhouse behind the Lloyd’s home, and that’s where he recovers his memory.
Haywire 2011
92 minutes This is mostly a
martial arts film. Mallory Kane is an
undercover operative for a security company that has contracts with CIA. She is sent on a mission to extract a hostage
and she succeeds. She is immediately
sent on another mission which is actually a set up to get her killed as part of
a giant cover up. Gina Carano, who plays
Kane, wasn’t an actor when she was hired for this film. She was 155 pounds of rather attractive
gristle who had won 12 out of 13 cage boxing matches and was planning for
more. This is only an o.k. film, but the
job she does, considering her lack of acting experience is amazing.
J. Edgar 2011
137 minutes I never thought I
would say I didn’t like a film directed by Clint Eastwood, but I had problems
with this one. The depressing story of
Hoover gets told from beginning to end and maybe that’s the problem. Hoover was a bastard and there’s only one
thing worse, a hypocritical bastard, which he was in the pluperfect. Leonardo DiCaprio is convincing as Hoover,
especially in his later years.
Leaves of Grass 2010
105 minutes I wasn’t expecting
to like this film, but I did. Edward
Norton plays a classics professor at Brown and also his dropout twin brother,
who raises the finest hydroponic pot in Oklahama. Prof. Norton hasn’t seen his Oklahoma family
for more than ten years and doesn’t ever plan to see them again, but he is
inveigled to return home for a weekend.
His brother wants him to be seen around town looking like him while he
goes to Memphis to “settle a debt.” The
brother murders the drug lord who is pressuring him to expand his production
into other drugs and hopes the professor’s presence in his home town will
provide him with an ironclad alibi.
Things don’t work out. You do
get to see Keri Russell noodling, and Susan Sarandon plays Susan Sarandon.
Lilyhammer 2011
Season 1 An original Netflix TV
series on instant view doesn’t belong in a list of movie reviews, but here it
is. Steven VanZandt, who ran the Bada
Bing Club for Tony Soprano, plays Frank Tagliano, a gangster who asks for
Lilyhammer when he enters the witness protection program after testifying
against a Mafia boss. It’s funny and sad
as he exploits every human weakness he finds among the incredibly decent and
law-abiding Norwegians. By Part 8 I
was convinced that he is eventually
going to corrupt the whole country.
Max Manus 2008
113 minutes This is the true story of Norwegian resistance
leader Max Manus who inflicted major damage on the Nazi war effort. He later became a successful businessman and
managed to die in bed in his 80s, but virtually all of his friends and
colleagues perished in the war. The
movie doesn’t have the flow that you would get in a Hollywood thriller and the
action scenes are sparse by Hollywood standards, but maybe that makes them all
the more convincing as events that actually happened to real people in real
towns and cities in Norway during WW II.
Mission: Impossible –
Ghost Protocol 2011 133 long minutes Time to hang it up, Cruise. If you want to do all these crazy stunts, why
not shift to animation and bring in someone attractive like Tin Tin. Or do a travel movie in which we can look at
the world’s tallest building without pretending that someone could crawl all
over the outside of it in a sandstorm and survive.
Queen to Play (Joueuse)
2009 101 minutes Helene is a hotel maid married to a handy
man. She notices a glamorous couple
playing chess at the hotel and decides she wants to learn. A doctor whom she cleans for one afternoon a
week reluctantly agrees to show her the basics.
He discovers that she has a real gift for the game and eventually she
does too. Her husband doesn’t approve of
her new interest and the villagers decide she is having an affair with the
doctor. She considers quitting, but with
the doctor’s help hones her skills, wins the local tournament to everyone’s
surprise, and heads to Paris for a major tournament. Yes, it’s about her hidden and unexpected
talent, but it’s more about her developing her intellectual capacities and what
that can do to change one’s life. If
you’re not paying attention, you may miss the fact that she also starts to
read.
Sarah’s Key 2010
102 minutes It’s Paris 1942 and
as the police are coming up the stairs to drag her family away to a camp, Sarah
hides her younger brother in a closet and takes the key with her. She expects to return right away, but she
first has to escape from the camp and find a way back to Paris. An old French couple helps her. By the time they get to Paris, the little
brother has died and begun to decompose.
It’s a traumatic experience from which Sarah never recovers. She lives with the old couple as their
daughter until she is old enough to make it on her own and then she
disappears. Sixty-seven years later her
story intersects with that of an American journalist investigating the
roundup. It’s a fascinating story based
on a novel. The round-up and the
separation of families at the camp will tear your heart out.
Tinker, Tailor,
Soldier, Spy 2011 128 minutes This a one of John LeCarre’s classic
thrillers of Cold War espionage. This
time there’s a high level mole in MI-6 and Smiley has to find him and avoid
being fingered as the mole himself. I
recently reread this novel and enjoyed it a lot. I found the film a little hard to follow.
Tower Heist 2011
104 minutes It’s Night at the Museum all over again. Ben Stiller is the manager of a Ritzy
Manhattan condo. He puts the employees’
pension fund in the hands of Alan Alda, a resident known for his financial
genius. Actually he’s more like Bernie
Madoff. Stiller gets together with the
other employees to hatch a plot to get their money back. There’s a solid gold car, a Jamaican maid who
can open safes, and a sympathetic female FBI agent who takes a liking to
Stiller. It’s a gas.
The Way 2010
120 minutes When Martin Sheen’s
son dies in the Pyrenees while hiking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route,
he flies to France to claim the remains.
Once there he decides to make the trek himself and dispose of his son’
ashes gradually as he hikes the long pilgrim road. Along the way, he learns to deal with the
issues he had with his 40 something itinerant bachelor son and accrues three
traveling companions, each with his or her own issues. The point is well made that the pilgrimage
can be a life altering event, but I wish the director had been able to show us
more of sites along the way.
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