Crossing Over 2009
113 minutes Harrison Ford plays
an I.C.E. officer; Ray Liotta is an adjudicator who examines and rules on the
issue of green cards and Ashley Judd, Liotta’s wife, is an immigration defense
lawyer. The film interweaves several
specific cases to provide a look at border crossing, document fraud, asylum
seekers, naturalization, counter-terrorism and the clash of cultures in America. Some of the cases will tear your heart out.
.
Erased 2012
104 minutes A CIA agent, Ben
Logan, who did some “wet work” and then asked for other duties was forced out
of the agency and barred from returning to the US. He was hired as a security expert in the
Belgian offices of a multinational company.
He brought his 15 year old daughter from the US to live with him in an
apartment in Antwerp. After he started
asking questions about some of the patents on the gear they were making, he suddenly
found that all of his colleagues had been murdered one by one, the offices
where they worked had been stripped bare, and there was no record of the
company or of his existence in Belgium. Meanwhile documents extremely injurious
to the parent company had been stolen from a CIA vault. Ben grabs his daughter and goes on the
run. The company’s people, including a
corrupt CIA agent, come after him. He
and his daughter are too much for them.
.
Grave of the Fireflies
(Hotaru no Haka) 1988 88 minutes
This is an anime film directed by Isao Takahata. It’s the summer of 1945, and a boy of about
10 to 12 lives with his mother and little sister in a town in Kansai that is
close enough to a city to experience periodic bombing.
Their father is serving on a Japanese cruiser.
Their mother dies in a bombing raid and they go to live with an aunt,
who mistreats them. They go off on their
own and try to survive. The war is soon over,
but there just isn’t any food. Eventually
the sister, who is just beyond being a toddler, dies of starvation despite heroic
efforts by the boy to feed the two of them.
Then he dies too in a subway station.
This is as grim an anti-war movie as I have ever seen.
.
A History of Violence 2005
100 minutes Tom Stall (Viggo
Mortensen) runs a diner in a small town in Indiana and his wife has a law
practice. It’s as if they stepped out of
a Norman Rockwell painting. Two thugs
come into the diner and it’s soon clear they are going to kill everyone in the
place. Tom starts with a coffee pot to
the jaw and quickly kills both thugs. He’s
a hero and his picture goes all over the country. A week or so later two guys from Philly (Ed
Harris and some muscle) show up and start talking to Tom as if he is a gangster
named Joey Caruso. Tom says it’s a case
of mistaken identity, and the sheriff runs them off. Soon they are back, only there are three of
them and they come to Tom’s house and tell him he must come with them to see
his brother. When Tom says “no,” they
pull Tom’s son out of their car. Tom
says he’ll go with them, if they let his son go. After his son is clear, he manages to kill
two of them but is about to get shot in the back by the third guy, when Tom’s son
shoots the thug with the family shotgun.
Then Tom has to confess to his family that he used to be Joey Caruso but
chose to get out of “the life.” There is
still unfinished business, and Tom/Joey takes off for Philly in his
pickup. He finishes the business – after
his brother tries to have him garroted, he kills his brother and all of his
thugs. In the last scene, he comes in while
the family is having dinner. No one says
anything. His daughter brings a plate
for him. He sits down. Cut to black.
.
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The Long Goodbye
1973 112 minutes Elliott Gould is Phillip Marlowe smoking at
least 100 cigarettes, solving a murder, shooting the bad guy who was going to
get away with it, and leaving the bad girl stranded with no money and no bad
guy-lover. Times have changed since
1973. This is an interesting and cynical
film by Robert Altman, but somehow all that smoking is a big turn off.
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