12 Years a Slave 2013
134 minutes The autobiography of
Solomon Northup, a free black man who was abducted from New York state and sold
into slavery in the mid-1800s, serves as the basis for this historical
drama. Brad Pitt is not on screen for
very long but he provides the key to Northup’s long struggle to regain his
freedom. I’ve done a lot of reading
over the years, but I can’t think of anything that equals this film in
portraying the appalling nightmare of slavery.
Chiwetel Ejiofor’s portrayal of
Northup is eloquent and moving.
.
The Book Thief 2013
131 minutes When the film opens,
Liesel Meminger is on a train with her
mother and younger brother on their way to be given up for adoption because the
mother can’t feed them. The brother dies
on the train and they stop to bury him.
This is Nazi Germany just before WW II and food is already in short supply. The foster parents are upset because they
were expecting two ration books. They
are poor and seem rather stern at first, especially the mother. Liesel steals a book that didn’t get burned
in a Nazi bonfire. Her new father helps
her to learn to read. Later she borrows
books from Lisa, the wife of the burgomeister to whom she delivers
laundry. When Lisa’s husband finds out, he
kicks Liesel out and finds someone else to do his laundry. So she sneaks in and “borrows” books. Meanwhile her parents have taken in a young
Jewish guy, Max, who is ill and in danger of being sent to a camp. They hide him in the basement for as long as
they can and Liesel helps care for him.
She reads to him endlessly while he seems to be in a coma. When he recovers, he leaves. Chances of escaping to the West in 1942 are
slim, but if he stayed he would surely have been discovered and all of them
would have been sent to camps. Later
Lisa sees Max being marched along the street with a group of Jews. She starts to walk with him but is soon
jerked out of the line and beaten by a soldier.
Later in the war, Allied bombing finds their town and eventually their
street. Both parents and Liesel’s best
and only friend are killed. When the
Allies come at war’s end, Max is with them and comes to find Liesel. In a sort of epilogue, we learn they were
married and we see the expansive apartment in Australia where they lived until
she died in her nineties.
.
Gravity 2013
91 minutes I was on the edge of
my seat every second. Sandra Bullock
plays a medical engineer on her first shuttle mission. George Clooney plays a seasoned astronaut
and is the only other character we see alive.
As the film opens they are on a spacewalk working on the Hubble
Telescope when then there is a warning that some space junk is headed their
way. When the stuff starts to hit,
Bullock becomes untethered and drifts off into space. Clooney catches up with her and brings her
back to the shuttle but the shuttle is destroyed and the crew is dead. They use Clooney’s jet pack to get to the
abandoned ISS. The plan is to take a
Russian shuttle parked there to the Chinese space station where there is a
lifeboat that will get them back to earth.
When they get to the ISS Clooney can’t hang on and drifts away. Bullock is left on her own to make her way
back to earth. The special effects are
simply incredible.
.
Pray for Japan 2012
This is a documentary about one town’s efforts to recover from the great
tsunami that devastated many coastal cities in Northern Japan. It’s painful to watch, but you have to admire
the determination of the people to survive and then reconnect and rebuild. Among the people the crew follows are two
dedicated junior high teachers as they try to find all of their students and
then reestablish their school. Food was
a problem and many volunteers simply went into stores elsewhere in Japan,
bought as much as they could load into their cars and then drove to the
disaster area. Two Pakistani chefs from
Nagoya, who spoke excellent Japanese, brought a truck load of food and stayed a
couple of months cooking for the local people.
If curries weren’t popular there before, they are now. It wasn’t
fun to watch, but I’m glad I did
.
Trois Couleur, a
trilogy directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski
.
Blue (Bleu) 1993
98 minutes This is the first of
a three film series titled Blue, White
and Red signifying liberty, equality and fraternity. In each film he uses the color of the title
extensively and subtlely to enhance the theme or emotion he wants to project in
a given scene. The
subject of Blue is liberty,
specifically emotional liberty, rather than its social or political
meaning. Set in Paris, the film is
about a woman played by Juliette Binoche.
As the film opens Binoche and her husband Patrice, a famous composer,
and her daughter are driving on the highway.
In a view under the car, we see something dripping. Soon the brakes fail and the husband and
daughter are killed in the ensuing crash.
She is alive but badly injured.
Suddenly set free from her familial bonds, she attempts to cut herself
off from everything and live in isolation from her former ties. She can’t do it and begins to involve herself
in the lives of others who seem to need help.
When she learns that her husband had been having an affair, she decides
she must meet the “other woman.” When
she finally does, she learns that the woman is pregnant with her husband’s
child. She feels a connection and
arranges for the woman and the expected child to have the house that she had
lived in with her husband and to have her husband’s paternity recognized. And then there is the question of her
husband’s music and just how much of it was written by her. In the bonus features cinematographer
Slawomir Idziak talks about a scene at the very beginning to show how
Kieslowski could use the simplest devices to reinforce his view of the
story. The car stops along the side of
the road so that the daughter can run into the woods to pee. The cinematographer’s was going to have the
camera follow her into the woods, but Kieslowski had him swing back and hold it
on Patrice, who was standing beside the car.
This departure from what every cinematographer knows and what every
viewer expects was to warn the audience that something ominous was about to
happen.
.
White 1994
92 minutes Karol Karol played by
Zbigniew Zamachowski is a shy man who
owns a hair salon in Paris with his wife, played by Julie Delpy. When Karol can’t consummate the marriage,
Delpy divorces him, and he loses everything including his passport. In the Metro he meets a Pole named Mikolaj,
who tells him he can make some real money if he will kill a man who wants to
die but can’t seem to do it himself.
Karol declines but gets Mikolaj to help him fly back to Poland by
stowing away in a large suitcase. Back
in Poland he finds a way to make a lot of money and makes Delpy his heir if he
dies. Then he fakes his own death, she
comes to the funeral and he frames her for his murder. His revenge is complete, but she still loves
him and he loves her. In the last scene
he stands outside the prison where he can see her in a window. They talk about the future with hand
gestures.
.
Red 1994
99 minutes Kieslowski said this would be his last film, and it was. He died in 1996. (In the bonus materials that came with all
three films, Kieslowski never appeared without a cigarette in his mouth). The story in Red has no obvious connection with the previous two films other
than completing the phrase liberty, equality, fraternity. Again there are interesting and unexpected
visual effects and coincidences and lots of red. The Netflix notes call this film a meditation
on the need for passion and human connections in which an accident brings
together Valentine, a photographers’ model , and a retired judge, Joseph
Kern. It’s very complicated. If you want the whole plot, go to Wiki. It is the connection established between
Valentine and the judge that satisfies the fraternity part of the trilogy. In the last scene the ferryboat that
Valentine is taking to England sinks.
Among the seven survivors are Julie and Olivier from Blue, Karol and Dominique from White,
and Valentine and her estranged boy friend
Auguste. Valentine and Auguste
were unaware of each other’s presence on the boat.
.
Vision: From the Life
of Hildegard von Bingen 2009 111 minutes
Barbara Sukowa plays Hildegard.
Wiki calls Hildegard “the famed
12th century Benedictine nun, Christian mystic, composer, philosopher,
playwright, physician, poet, naturalist, scientist and ecological activist” and goes on to say “Hildegard was a
multi-talented, fully grounded, highly intelligent woman who was forced to hide
her light. The modern world's first female rebel who re-transmitted her visions
to the world for the greater glory of God and mankind.” (sic) Perhaps
the film does a good job of recreating the grim, hyper-religious life of
monasteries and convents. It is
effective in showing the relationships among the nuns and between the nuns and
the male clergy. Apparently, when a
noble family shut a daughters away in a convent, it made sure it got its money’s
worth by helping the daughter along to become an abbess. I was appalled
at the self mutilations the nuns performed as acts of piety and apparently so
was Hildegard. This film was slow and
might have been better as a stage play.
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