Benny and Joon
1993 98 minutes Benny, played by Aidan Quinn, is an auto
mechanic, who lives with and cares for Joon, his mentally troubled sister
played by Mary Stuart Masterson. Benny
has trouble keeping a housekeeper who can watch Joon while he is at work, and
their social worker keeps pressing him to put Joon in a group home and start a
life for himself. Just at the time he
has run out of housekeepers, he “wins” the nephew of a friend in a poker
game. Sam, the nephew played by Johnny
Depp back when he was more fun, has been living with his uncle for only a few
days and has been driving him crazy. He’s
illiterate, but he’s a talented clown and he can cook and do housework. Benny decides to hire him. It doesn’t occur to him that Sam and Joon
might fall in love and be able to make an independent life for themselves. The movie has some serious things to say
about mental illness and at the same time is entertaining and funny.
.
Dancing Across Borders
2010 87 minutes On a visit to Cambodia art enthusiast and
philanthropist Anne Bass met a young street performer named Sokvannara "Sy"
Sar who seemed to have unusual potential.
She arranged for him to come to the US and train at the Pacific
Northwest Ballet School. At almost 17 he
was about 8 years too old, but she persuaded the school to give him a
chance. The first half of the film drags
a bit because it consists mostly of interviews and one on one dance lessons
with Olga Kostritzky. It’s worth a
little patience because the second half shows the metamorphosis with a dozen or
more solo numbers and the beginning of his training as a partner. This was Anne Bass’s first film and is well
worth seeing.
.
End of the Spear
2005 111 minutes A missionary who tries to make contact with
the Waodani tribesmen in the Ecuadorian jungle along the Amazon gets speared
for his trouble. Years later his son
returns to Ecuador to try to understand what happened. By that time the tribe had been contacted and
had accepted the presence of missionaries and traders. What makes this worth watching is the
contrast between the way the Waodani and the missionaries interpreted each other’s
behavior.
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From Time to Time 2009 96 minutes
This is basically a ghost story.
When a 13 year old boy returns to his family’s ancestral home for the
Christmas holidays, his grandmother played by Maggie Smith, of course, coaches
him as he starts to learn about his family’s history and the manor house in
which they lived. It seems that ghosts
will appear to people who mean well, and so they help the boy discover some of
the unpleasantness of the past and a lost cache of jewels. The
time travel of the title usually happened when he walked from one room to
another. Suddenly he would be in another
century for as long as he was in the room.
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Hannah Arendt
2012 113 minutes Arendt, a pupil and lover of Heidegger, fled
Nazi Germany and became a professor of philosophy in New York City. She had a long and distinguished career, and
I have mixed feelings about the film makers’ decision to focus on her coverage
of the Eichmann trial in 1961 for the New
Yorker. Her phrase that everyone remembers
is “the banality of evil.” Arendt seems
to have been taken in somewhat by Eichmann’s contention that he was only
following orders. Throughout his
testimony, he refused to take responsibility for anything. It was only later that documentation was
uncovered that proved that Eichmann was an enthusiastic contributor to the
design and implementation of “the final solution.” In the end Arendt comes off pretty well as do
the people at the New Yorker who
supported her and printed her articles.
.
The Longest Yard 2005 113 minutes
This is a remake of the 1974 film.
In this one Adam Sandler plays Paul Crewe, a disgraced NFL quarterback,
who was rumored to have done some point shaving while playing for the
Pittsburgh Steelers. Burt Reynolds, who
played Crewe in 1974, is Coach Nate Scarborough. Both are in prison and forced by the warden
to put together a team of prisoners to play an exhibition game against the
guards at the opening of the guards’ semi-pro season. The best of this is the recruitment of the team
members. There’s a lot of enthusiasm for
getting a chance to get back at the guards for their brutality. I haven’t seen the 1974 version, but this one
is funny.
.
Only When I Dance
2009 78 minutes The film follows two young, black dancers
from the slums of Rio de Janeiro as they pursue their dream of becoming ballet
stars. Besides their rigorous training,
they had to raise the money for their trips abroad to enter competitions and
get a chance of being noticed by a ballet company. And there was the “problem” of being black
and poor in an art form patronized by the wealthy white elite. It’s a good story and there are a lot of
clips of their training routines and performances.
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Paris, Je T’aime
2006 110 minutes This
is 18 five-minute shorts united by the common theme of love in the City of
Lights. It just flows along. Everyone is in it. Delightful.
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Red 2 2013 116 minutes
Bruce Willis, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren are together again chasing
a nuclear device buried somewhere in Moscow – under the Kremlin, of course.
Unfortunately the writers killed off Morgan Freeman in their first get
together. The bomb was hidden in Moscow 32
years earlier by a mad scientist played by Anthony Hopkins. Everyone thinks he was killed by a car bomb
but actually MI-6 has had him locked up in solitary all that time. It’s all crazy, impossible and funny. I wish I had had some sort of clicker to keep
track of how many people got shot. The
queen, I mean Helen Mirren, does her usual thing with several different
submachine guns when she doesn’t have a huge horse pistol in either hand.
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