42 2013
128 minutes Recently I read a
review of Lee Daniel”s the Butler,
which said it was the first serious civil rights film of our era and expressed
a hope that there would be more.
Apparently the writer hadn’t seen 42,
as perfect a civil rights film as anyone could ask for. Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey may be his
greatest role, although it’s hard to watch him playing an old man. He’s supposed to be young forever. Chadwick Boseman , who plays Jackie Robinson,
was new to me, but he does a creditable
job. Alan Tudyk as Ben Chapman, the
Philadelphia manager, launches an extended diatribe at Robinson, which sets the
standard for bigotry. I think it’s
important that people hear that to understand how far we have come since 1947.
.
Honeydripper 2007
123 minutes Danny Glover plays
Pine Top Purvis, a piano player who left the circuit because he didn’t want to
die alone in an Arkansas hotel, and became the owner of a juke joint in
Harmony, Alabama in the early 1950s.
When the debts pile up, he hires Guitar Sam for a special performance to
try to save his business. When Sam
doesn’t show up – he rarely does – Pine top asks Sonny Blake, a young drifter
played by Gary Clark, Jr., to fill in.
The kid plays an electric guitar, which was new to everyone in Harmony,
and he is a sensation. Glover’s
problems are over. There are lots of
those: his lien holder who wants to take over the place, the redneck police
chief who looks at Pine Top and all other blacks as opportunities for
extortion, and a competing club that has stolen away his clientele with more
“up to date” music. What the kid brings
is rock ‘n roll, before it was really called that. John Sayles, the director, based Guitar Sam
on a real character, Guitar Slim.
Apparently aspiring young musicians all over the south got their first
big gigs impersonating no-show Guitar Slim.
This film didn’t get very good critical reviews – one faulted it for stereotyping
1950s blacks and whites – and that’s a valid criticism, but I liked it anyway,
perhaps because the whole cast is so strong.
.
An Invisible Sign 2012
95 minutes This is one of the
strangest movies I’ve ever seen. Jessica
Alba plays Mona, a mathematician’s daughter, who is traumatized around age 10 when her father becomes
mentally ill. She isolates herself in a
world of numbers and when we meet her as an adult she is still hiding
there. When she is asked to teach math
classes at the local grade school, she discovers that her gift for math can be
the route back from emotional exile.
.
Shadow Dancer 2012
96 minutes Collette, a single
mother and career IRA terrorist, is captured after an abortive bombing in
London and faces an excruciating ultimatum. She can either turn against her
lifelong compatriots or go to prison for life and be separated forever from her
son. Eventually she breaks and reveals
to Clive Owen an operation that involves members of her own family. When the operation goes bad, the local IRA
leader suspects she is the leak. This
was a set up by another intelligence unit to protect their own source by
drawing attention to Collette. Things
really don’t work out for anyone. An interesting
film and very dark.
.
Sunshine 1999
180 minutes Ralph Fiennes
portrays father, son and grandson, Ignatz, Adam and Ivan, in a story that
follows the efforts of the Sonnenscheins, a Hungarian Jewish family to survive
anti-Semitism through three generations.
The family fortune was based on a liquor business developed from a
formula that was brought to Budapest by a 12 year old boy from his village
which had been destroyed in a pogrom. He
was Ignatz’s father. Ignatz is a judge, who
agrees to change his surname to something less Jewish in order to advance. Adam wins a gold medal in fencing at the 1936
Olympics and is beaten to death in a prison camp. Ivan becomes a policeman in the security
service of the Communist government that took power after WW II. While the film is fiction, many of its events
are based on real events and some of its characters have elements of real
people. I don’t know how many more films
I want to see that include the holocaust, but I’m glad I saw this one.
.
Vinci 2004
108 minutes Cuma, an
incorrigible thief, is suddenly furloughed from prison on health grounds. Apparently the furlough was arranged with the
prison doctor by Fatso, who had a contract with a western businessman who
wanted to acquire Leonardo da Vinci's Lady
with Ermine. Fatso hired Cuma to
steal it from the Czartoryskich Museum for one million Euros and a fake
passport. Cuma persuades Julian or
“Cricket,” a former accomplice who has since become a policeman, to work with
him again. The movie has scams within
scams and everybody wins except four businessmen who thought that had bought
the original. Cuma was able to steal the
original in an ingenious way, but returned it after the copies were sold. In one of the last scenes the granddaughter
of Hagen, the forger, chides him for being in too much of hurry. “We sold four but we could have sold ten.” (I suspect Hagen stopped at four because the
antique walnut chest he bought to get the aged walnut panels for the paintings
had only four drawers). Cuma ends up
with 4 million Euros in his bank account and voluntarily goes back to prison to
finish the last year of his sentence so that afterwards he can stay in Poland
and just enjoy being rich.
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