Drama

The Blind Side

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Family Dramedy. The true story of the white southern Touhy Family rescuing and then adopting a tall African American kid that has been abused by the ghetto culture, the government system, and his own family. This is an atypical film coming out of Hollywood because it’s worldview is of middle American traditional values. It portrays the Southern family in a positive light rather than negative stereotype and it champions private charity over government dependency.

Regarding the Southern Christian worldview, the family prays over their Thanksgiving dinner with reference to Jesus Christ, and they make the point of their Christian duty to help the unfortunate. Special attention is drawn to a Scriptural reference (incorrectly quoted) of the high school’s motto: “With man this is possible. With God, all things are possible.” The correct biblical reference is “With man this is IMPOSSIBLE, but with God all things are possible.” Be that as it may, this shows the Christian culture as the driving force of the compassion.

The movie reveals an occasional racist sentiment in a lone jerk, but not in the culture at large. These rich Southerners may be a bit embarrassed and don’t know what to do, but they are not hate mongers. In fact, the movie pokes good fun at both sides of the political spectrum, and portrays racism as an inherent part of the government welfare system and ghetto culture as well. For instance, the tutor for “Big Mike” confesses with fear of reprisal that she is a Democrat. Yet, the family, an obvious Republican Southern family, doesn’t blink an eye. They don’t care, they just want to help Michael. But then the dad says, “Who’d have thought we would adopt a black kid before we met our first Democrat.” Later, when the mom, Leigh Anne (Sandra Bullock) hears her new son Michael is threatened by his old ghetto homeys, she walks proudly up to them and says, “When you threaten my son, you threaten me.” When the gang guy threatens to bring guns and do violence, she retorts that she is a proud member of the NRA, and packs her own heat, and is not afraid. The answer to growing cultural violence here is clearly responsibly armed citizens. The only moment of violence in the movie is ironically, when Big Mike goes back to his ghetto homeys and is tempted to be drawn into their life of crime by the gang leader. But when they threaten Mike’s new white family, he explodes in violence and trashes them all. Why? Because of his love for those who loved him first. Michael’s highest value is to protect others, and so the movie justifies standing with force against those who threaten the family.

The Touhy’s are very wealthy and own multiple Taco restaurants, but they are giving charitable people who in the end care much more for people than for things. Some fun is made of the fact that their fellow lunch going friends are removed rich people who believe in giving some charity, but not “taking it so seriously as to adopt Michael,” but these people are shamed by Leigh Anne’s authentic love.

Regarding the failure of government and institutions, the movie depicts the institutions as being antagonistic to those who help people like “Big Mike.” Movies are not made in a vacuum. And this movie, coming out as it does in the midst of a time of strong appeal to government solutions creates a stark contrast with its reliance of the individual through hard work and personal charity. The government welfare system fails to help Michael, in having him fall through the cracks, his ghetto culture is depicted as failing him by succumbing to drugs, welfare slavery, and personal irresponsibility. Even the NCAA is shown as antagonistic toward helping blacks when it challenges the motives of why the Touhy’s rescued Michael and helped him to go to college, rather than honoring them.

This leads to the major theme of the movie: Family. Michael is loved by the Touhys and he adopts THEM as his family because of their love for him, as opposed to his blood which fails him. Family love transcends race in this story. The family simply loves him and he blossoms despite the government and society being against this notion. Family love wins the day. All along the way, their motives for loving Michael are challenged: They’re just doing it to feel good about themselves, they’re just doing it out of white guilt, they’re just doing it for some kind of financial benefit. But all these theories are dispelled in the face of the simple display of genuine family love. And when the NCAA challenges the Touhy’s motives of guiding Michael toward Ole’ Miss for college because of a ludicrous financial conspiracy, Michael questions his new family, but the parents tell him he can go wherever he wants to go because they love him. Then he CHOOSES Ole’ Miss anyway, because “That’s where my family went.” In this story, family love and private charity is deeper and more redemptive than race, welfare, government, institutions, hate, money, and blood.

Coco Before Chanel

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The story of the beginnings of Gabrielle Chanel from a destitute French orphan near the turn of the 19th century to the beginnings of what would become her empire of fashion design. It’s feminist tale of liberation as Gabrielle seeks to make her own way in a “man’s world” as the end titles say. It portrays the French aristocracy as decadent and even boring in their life of leisure — to this woman, a hard working seamstress and bar dancer. So in that sense it elevates the protestant work ethic and self-made entrepreneurship over aristocratic inheritance and old money.

When Coco becomes a mistress of French millionaire Balsan, she pursues her hobby of decorating hats and wearing simple clothes that bucked the system of lavish overwrought women’s apparel with imprisoning corsets and padding of the time period. She seeks to give women freedom in their clothes and thus their bodies, and thus, their social status. Of course, she never really loves Balsan, who eventually falls in love with her and is willing to marry her against his social status. But it is too late, because she falls in love with Balsan’s best friend, “Boy” Capel, all the while maintaining her independent spirit.

The movie attempts to disconnect true passionate and meaningful love from marriage and link it to adulteress lifestyles. In the movie, all the rich men, including Coco’s lover, marry for socio-economic status, but have mistresses for true love, where they “really” experience the intimacy of being known and loved (which in the movie is depicted as nothing much beyond “fun trips and sex”). Coco complains that her mother married for love and ended up destitute and dead, with Coco and her sister in an orphanage. So marriage does not get very high marks in Coco’s mind of romantic hope.

Coco is devastated when she realizes she cannot marry Capel because he is getting married for status, but hardens herself and decides to never marry and just live the life of Capel’s mistress while growing her own business and maintaining her own independence. And they are able to do so until Capel dies in a car accident and we see in the face of Coco, a devastating loss – in the midst of her increasing success – that it appears she never overcomes for the rest of her life, since she never married.

In an ironic deconstructive way, the movie seems to bear the internal contradiction that regardless of this liberation of Coco, she doesn’t really have the intimate love she found in that one man and ends life rather sad, despite her worldly success. It seems that career may be a fulfillment of her genius, but is not the ultimate meaning for this woman who desired to be known by love, a love she sought outside marriage, a love that evaded her to her death.

A Serious Man

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Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest movie wrestles with God’s sovereignty and man’s free will in this story of a 1960s Jewish physics professor and his world falling apart like the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Larry Gopnik’s wife has fallen in love with a Jewish widower and wants to give him a ritual divorce so she can remarry within the religion, his son is approaching his bar mitzvah while exploring drugs and rock and roll, and Larry’s brother, a loser with a Rain Man-like psychological dysfunction, is living with him sucking the life out of him. In fact, everyone seems to be sucking the life out of Larry, what with all his responsibilities in life. Even a Chinese student with failing grades tries to bribe him and then blackmail him for accepting bribes.

And all throughout the movie, we hear the repeated phrase, mostly from Larry, but also others: “But I didn’t do anything.” It is used in various contexts but often as an excuse for feeling treated unfairly in life by others or God. Larry’s brother is taken in by the cops for gambling, “but I didn’t do anything”: Larry’s wife tells him she wants a divorce, “but I didn’t do anything” he replies, and so on throughout. The point seems to be that we make excuses for not being active in our lives, for not taking responsibility for what happens to us. And the biggest accusation in this story seems to be a religious one, that in our resignation to God being “in control” we become passive agents in a universe that are acted upon – we miss the opportunities of a lifetime because we are immobilized by our worldview or theology.

Larry is portrayed as believing that he is just supposed to be a good boy and bad things won’t happen – but they do – to him. He seems to keep losing everything dear to him from his wife to his reputation, to his lawn, to his job, all because he “goes along” and doesn’t take action in his life. At marriage counseling his too-young rabbi tells him he should just accept this divorce, resigning himself to the fact that God is in control and it’s just a matter of changing his perspective and he’ be able to cope. In other words, an almost Buddhist approach where you do not fight what happens in the world, you change your desires. This religious resignation is shown as being at fault for Larry not really living life. By resigning one’s self to the will of a deity, rather than choosing to act, one misses out on living life, such as the pot smoking libertine hot chick next door, who Larry notices sunbathing (reminiscent of King David on the roof seeing Bathsheba) – or rather, that Larry fantasizes as being a pot smoking libertine, but he never acts upon his fantasies.

A Serious Man brings in the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle as well as Schrodinger’s cat metaphor as a philosophical expression for Larry’s worldview that concludes after explaining a huge chalkboard of mathematics that we can’t possibly know what’s going to happen. Another excuse for “not doing anything.” I think the humanist worldview to this film is that since we can’t know what is going to happen because the future is not determined, then to resign ourselves to God’s will is to not take the responsibility we have for making our own fate and destiny by acting upon our desires. Larry is a passive hero who keeps avoiding responsibility for his life and keeps missing out on really living because he refuses to be the master of his fate and thus becomes the pawn of others.

Whip It

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Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut about a young girl in a small town in Texas who desires to get out from under her mother’s stifling expectations for her so she can do what she has discovered she really wants: Roller derby! Starring Ellen Page as Bliss Cavender, this story, as with all Barrymore’s stories, is a women’s empowerment narrative about women needing to come out from under oppressive social norms for their roles.

Ellen’s mom, played by Marcia Gay Hardin, is molding her two daughters to be beauty pageant queens just like herself. This of course doesn’t fit for Bliss, but she goes along to make mom happy until she finds what she really loves to do, roller derbying, which causes the turmoil. Bliss accuses mom of shoving her small town “50s morality” (an obvious reference to the traditional gender roles and family notions) down her throat. But what makes this more than a simplistic feminist fairytale is when a fellow roller derby queen challenges Bliss that she is being selfish and that her mom may be wrong about roller derby, but she cares for Bliss and is only trying to help her, and that mom’s rules are for her own good, NOT because she wants to hurt her or control her – that there is value to what her mother thinks. The mom and dad are actually happily married and even frisky, thus showing such “traditional” marriage as mostly positive.

There are no strong men characters in this movie, illustrating a female gender bias in the viewpoint. The roller derby coach is a loony obsessed with exercise and acting like a pothead with a few screws loose. Bliss’s very first rock and roll boyfriend turns out to be a womanizer, and the announcer of the roller derby is a loser horny toad always failing to get laid. Bliss’ dad, played by Daniel Stern, is a stereotypical couch potato sports fan who follows mom’s lead instead of being a leader in the family. He is too weak to face mom about her contempt for sports so he watches the football game by lying to her that he is staying late at work. He pretty much cow tows to her until the end, when he is the first one to support Bliss and takes the lead by pulling Bliss out of the big pageant and bringing her to the roller derby. So his leadership is portrayed as good when supportive of Bliss’ desires.

So this film seems to prioritize the individual’s dreams without negating the value of family. The collective family and the individual member can get along and balance each other’s interests.

Julie & Julia

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A story of food, love and the meaning of life. I believe this movie is a tale of romantic existentialist redemption that proposes we find our significance in life through a quasi-religious notion of transcendence that we create for ourselves out of the stuff of this world.

It tells two tales in different time periods as sort of parallel universes. The first is the story of how Julia Child “became Julia Child,” the famous American cook. It shows her married to an American government diplomat in France starting in 1949, and charts her journey of emptiness at not being able to have children, with her subsequent search for a fulfilling meaningful productive life. She discovers her purpose through the one thing she loves to do more than anything: eat! She eventually learns how to cook French food and the rest is history, especially the story of how she got her first cook book of 524 recipes published with two French women.

The other story is about Julie, a modern day woman, played by Amy Adams, in search of significance in her life. She feels as if she has no meaning working in a cubicle for an insurance company dealing with human losses of 911. She is restless and can never seem to finish anything she starts, including a novel she only got halfway through writing. But she loves Julia Child, so her husband encourages her to cook her way through the 524 recipes of that very cook book of Julia Child’s, in 365 days, and to blog about it online. She takes the challenge and discovers that she begins to have significance in the world as eventually people read her blog and she shares her life lessons through food and Julia.

The language throughout is very religious. Julie explains to her friends how she is always wondering what Julia would do, or how she can please Julia, as if she were right there with her. She explains that she now has a sense of meaning and purpose to her life, that “Julia saved her”. It’s very much the salvific language of deity shifted to an imminent or “this worldly” creation. And that real world human proves to be as fickle as the anthropomorphic greek deities of old. When the 90-year old Julia Child discovers Julie’s blog, that has become very famous, she rejects her for being disrespectful and Julie never gets to meet her real world idol. But her husband encourages her that it’s better that way, because the “Julia in your mind is more important.” In other words, the real world cannot provide significance to our lives because it will fail us, only the transcendent deities we create in our minds to give us meaning are what matter. We create our own meaning and significance through our imagination.

A final touch at the end underscores the religious element of this worldview as Julie and her husband visit a museum that has a replica of Julia’s French kitchen. Julie walks up to a picture of Julia Child and places a pound of butter on the altar-like table beneath the picture, a very clear reference to the thank offerings of food given in many religions to pictures of ancestors or tribal deities.

The movie does have an unusually positive depiction of marriage in showing both Julie’s and Julia’s husbands as being entirely supportive of their personal quests for meaning, and showing marriage as a very positive element of their happiness, regardless of it being unable to provide ultimate significance, with which most religious people would agree.

The film also projects an anti-Republican political agenda in depicting the essence of Julia’s curmudgeonly unaccepting father as being connected with the political pariah of Communist “witch hunter” Joseph McCarthy. And it also reinforces this with a joke from Julie’s boss who says he won’t be like a Republican and fire her from her job for taking off a sick day when she wasn’t sick.

Be that as it may, Julie and Julia is a movie about finding transcendent significance in the imminence of our own imagination rooted in the “food” of this world.

District 9

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This story is about a huge alien spaceship having to dock over Johannesburg, South Africa for some kind of energy problems. The aliens can’t get home to their planet. They stay there for 20 years and end up being treated like illegal aliens or refugees in a loud and obvious political metaphor for today. They are herded into “District 9,” a walled off internment camp for the 1.2 million aliens from the mothership. It all looks like the refugee camps we’ve seen around the world, and it is ministered by the obvious U.N. parallel, the M.N.U., Multi-National United. This metaphor also carries xenophobic and racist overtones as we see in the movie all the signs and rules “segregating” aliens and humans: “Humans Only,” signs for bathrooms, etc. The aliens look like shrimp to humans, so they develop the “dehumanizing” name of “prawns” to refer to the aliens, just like racist lingo all over the world does: “Caffer” in apartheid, “N-word” in America, “Cracker” for white people, and on and on.

The hero, Wikus, a nerdish South African, begins his journey as a heartless government bureaucrat, more concerned about following protocol than about the unequal treatment of the aliens, such as the suppression of their reproduction by extermination of all their eggs, as well as the brutal treatment of the aliens, who have turned scavengers and ghetto-like in their behaviors. It is shot like a reality news show documentary to heighten the sense of reality, so that it’s not so much a sci-fi picture but closer to home, much like Cloverfield did with the handheld camcorder subjective view. Although this movie does have 3rd person omniscient moments to progress the story interspersed with the reality show style.

Anyway, so Wickus begins his journey as a heartless bureaucrat, but when he stumbles upon some strange liquid that splashes in his face, and begins to turn him into an alien, we see the obvious theme that xenophobic or racist fear of the other dissolves when we see “the other” or our enemy in ourselves, or when we see the world through the eyes of “the other.” No better way to accomplish that point than to literally turn into one of the “other.” Then of course, the government captures Wickus in order to experiment on him and discover how this genetic transformation can benefit the military to be able to use the alien weaponry, which only works with alien DNA. So Wickus discovers an entire laboratory where humans are experimenting on the aliens and cutting them up into scientific pieces for analysis, another strong parallel to Nazi, Japanese, and even American experimentation done on unwilling participants deemed as lives unworthy to be lived or as less than human. This movie does not place a lot of faith or trust in big government bureaucracy as a means for addressing the issues of illegal aliens, refugees or racial segregation.

One can surely understand why Wickus transforms and seeks to help an alien father and his son get back to the mothership in order to escape and bring back alien help from their planet. Especially, since Wickus by the end of the film, turns completely into an alien, waiting for the return of the aliens who will supposedly be able to turn Wickus back into a human. Wickus even ends up taking up arms as a “freedom fighter” against the M.N.U. forces trying to capture him and stop the aliens from leaving. Wickus will not doubt ever call the aliens “prawns” again.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

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This is a Holocaust movie of a different approach. It tells the story of the loss of innocence through the eyes of a young German boy, the son of an SS officer. The family moves into the woods just barely out of sight of the concentration camp that the father is in charge of. But father avoids telling his family what he is really doing, presumably from shame. The little boy, Bruno spies the work camp from his bedroom window and assumes it is a farm where everyone wears striped pajamas. He sneaks his way over there and befriends a young Jewish boy in the camp and spends time with him talking and playing games through the electrified fence. Bruno never quite figures out what is going on, but his grandma knows, and his mother soon finds out, and summarily falls into depression and angry resentment of her husband. But the film does not fall into stereotypes of females being against the Nazi vision and males being warmongers, as the boy Bruno never comprehends the darkness – his innocence protecting him – yet his older sister embraces it and becomes a Hitler Youth in her affections. We see Bruno’s confusion over the treatment of Jewish servants as subhuman, and in that comparison lies the film’s critique of cultures of death that always need to redefine those they wish to dispose of as less than human in order to salve the conscience. The power of this story lies in its ending, because the little boy becomes so united in soul with his little Jewish friend, that he sneaks into the camp and dresses in the “striped pajamas” in order to help the Jewish boy find his “lost” father, who we know has been burned in the ovens that fill the skies with smoke from their stacks. This movie is the serious version of It’s a Beautiful Life. In the latter, innocence was maintained through a humorous deception of the father, but in this story, innocence is required to be a victim of evil in order to show the willingness of self-deception in a society that justifies atrocities. As Bruno is in the camp, the story ends with him being corralled with other prisoners and being gassed in the showers with his little friend as his father seeks him too late. What makes this deeply disturbing and sad ending so uniquely powerful is that Bruno’s innocent friendship becomes the ultimate unity in death with the innocent Jewish boy in a way that could not even be captured with a deliberately chosen sacrifice. At the moment when the father realizes his son has been killed, one is convinced that he will abandon the ideology completely because he can no longer avoid the inhumanity of what he is doing. It is a backdoor portrayal of the golden rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It is an embodiment of the classic informal argument “What if it was YOUR family member who received the consequences of your beliefs?”

Public Enemies

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When I saw the title my first thought was, “Why is it plural? A movie about John Dillinger starring the illustrious talented Johnny Depp should clearly be called, ‘Public Enemy.’ Unless of course, Michael Mann is going to make a moral equivalency argument that the government that hunted down Dillinger was just as “criminal” or immoral as Dillinger. Therefore, the real public enemies are Hoover and his FBI gang.” And this is what I believe Mann has tried to do. Dillinger is depicted as a man without a country in that he is a Romantic, a “criminal with a heart of gold”: he doesn’t take individuals’ money at the bank, only bank money; He is a devoted and gentle lover of one woman in a world of sleaze; and he lives for the moment, being fiercely loyal to his friends. He doesn’t look beyond tomorrow, so eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. This existential worldview is depicted in the movie as being anachronistic in a modernizing era as crime syndicates learn to build a regular established illegal income through gambling rather than dangerous one-off bank robbing. Crime has lost its romance of the individual and become big business. Dillinger cannot continue to exist in this world with his fun loving devil may care Robin Hood romanticism. If you don’t change with the times, you will die, survival of the fittest. J. Edgar Hoover is depicted as a fool without any experience, therefore unworthy of his position. And the “good guy” tracking down Dillinger, Melvin Pervis, is depicted as cold and emotionless, a man of science who represents the future of the FBI, as he relies on new scientific techniques of forensics to track down bad guys, thus taking out all the glory of the human intuition. Pervis’ henchmen beat Dillinger’s woman, making them look more cruel than Dillinger. The Untouchables, this is NOT, as the good guys are portrayed as villainous and traitorous as the bad guys, in fact, quite often, simply stupid or neanderthal. So this is also a movie about the death of the romantic notion of Robin Hood redistributive justice in favor of the modern scientific method (forensics) and the big business of criminal syndicates. The real public enemies in this movie, as embodied in the FBI characters as well as crime syndicates are Enlightenment science and “corporatism” that has crushed the individual zest for life.

The Path to 9/11

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Espionage Miniseries. The story of how 9-11 came about based on the 9-11 Commission report. Directed by David Cunningham, the director of my movie, “To End All Wars.” This is going to be on TV, but it is so astonishingly powerful, that I had to blog about it. It completes the incredible “trilogy” of 9-11 movies that I would say every American should see. The others being “United 93” and “World Trade Center.”

“The Path to 9-11” shows the political realities that the other two neglect. Shot like the series 24 in handheld very shakey style, this 6 hour extravaganza is a miracle any Hollywood Network would actually make it. Why? Because it shows George Tenet of the CIA, and Sandy Berger of National Security and Bill Clinton are all directly responsible for Osama Bin Laden being alive and carrying out 9-11. (It reveals Clinton’s sexual immorality being a distraction from his ability to lead, in missing the opportunity to actually catch or kill Bin Laden. It shows that Clinton and his administration had the opportunity to catch Bin Laden and he did not give the order to do so (This is a compilation of several events). This is why Clinton has sought to persuade ABC to re-edit the program. It shows that the US Embassy head in Yemen (played brilliantly by Patricia Heaton) was so concerned about “offending” Islam and following their social customs with sensitivity training that she quashed the investigations after the USS Cole bombing. It shows that “racial profiling” was responsible for missing the terrorists. It shows that the little people like a Canadian border guard and an airplane pilot educator were heros because they ignored the rules against racial profiling and caught Moussaui and another terrorist. It shows that the Clinton administration, including Madeline Albright, betrayed the “only true friend” we had, the head of the Northern Alliance, and failed to support him when he needed our help the most. It portrays Richard Clarke as a hero who kept telling everyone this was going to happen and we should attack the terrorists and take them out, and no one listened. And it is not one sided in it’s critique either, for it shows the capture of Ramze Youssef and Moussaui, so it shows the positive movements of the Clinton administration as well. But it also critiques the Bush administration in showing that embarrassing moment for Bush at the elementary school during the attacks, and how the military was confused and incompetent in scrambling their jets. And it also shows Condi Rice “demoting” Clarke into a lesser job, when he was the one guy who was pointing out the danger and what they should do. So it is not a politically biased movie.

There is a beautiful moment which highlights the difference between Islam and Christianity. As firefighters are carrying people out of the WTC towers, a priest, dressed in firefighting garb is heard to be praying for the men who are heroically rescuing others as well as for the victims to keep them safe. This God of mercy and grace and self sacrifice juxtaposed against the previous 5 hours of Muslims praying to their god of war and rationalizing hatred and murder. EVERY AMERICAN MUST SEE THIS FILM. Thank you, David Cunningham and the writer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, for your courageous storytelling.

P.S. I just heard that ABC is re-editing the film in response to Clinton’s demand to make him look better. And that some US Senator has threatened to pull ABC’s license if they don’t pull the show. Wow, censorship. Where is the ACLU? That’s what I want to know. Now, let’s see, do you think ABC can be relied upon to tell the truth about anything when it capitulates to politicians like this? And then this lying Sandy Berger, who is a criminal who stole classified documents from National Security Archives and stuffed them in his pants to steal them — and this criminal scumbag is complaining about truthful portrayal? Jeesh. And by the way, the scene that Clinton is griping about, is a dramatization of the fact that the Administration failed to take several opportunities to catch Bin Laden (As documented in the 9/11 Commission Report, page 136-137).

The Illusionist

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Romantic Mystery. In turn-of-the-century Vienna, a magician uses his skills to win the heart of a woman above his class status. Paul Giametti plays the police captain who tells the story and is torn between his loyalty to a corrupt prince and justice. I found this story engrossing. Although one could tell that all the illusions were simply camera tricks, not true magical skill, which sort of made it harder to believe. On the other hand, it was still a great story of love and the pressure of social standing.