A period bio of the early reign of England’s Queen Victoria, played by Emily Blunt. It depicts her attempt to find true love and trust in the midst of an aristocratic world of political intrigue, where everyone has an agenda, and everyone seeks personal and political gain. Victoria discovers Prince Albert from Germany, who over time proves to be the only one who really cares for her well being, which starts with mistrust and testing and ends in an enduring love so often missing in such a world.
True Stories
Invictus
A true story of Nelson Mandela becoming president of South Africa and his subsequent attempt to bring the country together by focusing on the nation’s rugby team winning the World Cup. The movie begins with Mandela winning the election and being installed. The racial tensions run high as everyone, including his own entourage, expect a “regime change” mentality – fire all the previous administration and replace everyone with your own agents of power. But Mandela surprises them all, by his very first act in office. He calls the previous staff in and tells them that if they want to leave, they can, but if they want to stay and help bring change, then he will keep them. Much to the chagrin of his head of security, Mandela also brings in five big white Afrikaaners to round out his security. Mandela also stops the newly empowered rugby committee from disbanding their “all-but-one-white” team. Why? Because they see that team as a symbol of the oppression of the past. But Mandela sees it as the perfect location for embodying the very future unity the country needs.
And this is the theme of the movie: Overcoming injustice through forgiveness and reconciliation, rather than the multicultural view of overcoming injustice through the will to power and revolutionary regime change. Whereas multiculturalism would preach forced or artificial affirmative action and the vengeance of reverse discrimination against whites, Mandela says, “Forgiveness starts here. A rainbow nation starts here.” If you want to overcome past institutionalized injustice, you cannot replace it with a new injustice of institutionalized vengeance. That is only a cycle of violence. Demonizing previous administrations and punishing them is the injustice of victimology, crying victim in order to justify revenge.
Interestingly, the movie does not address in detail the fact that Mandela was also estranged from his wife because of her belief in violent resistance, but it does show his estrangement from his daughter because of his commitment to a higher cause. His daughter asserts the vengeance and regime change mentality of reparations and affirmative action. But Mandela tells her, “You seek only to assert your own personal feelings. That is selfish. That will not help build our nation.” Mandela so believes in the higher cause of forgiveness and reconciliation that he will even walk away from his family because they sought the ways of multicultural hate and violence.
The title of the movie comes from a poem by William Ernest Henley, “Invictus,” that Mandela quotes a couple times in the film. The last lines are emphasized in this lyric of overcoming the “fell clutch of circumstance” that bloodies the head of the oppressed in life: “I am master of my fate and the captain of my soul.” Mandela concludes, “If I cannot change when circumstances demand it, how can I expect others to?” And so this film is a story about living out grace and forgiveness instead of getting back at your oppressors by oppressing them when you are in power. That “master of my fate” line seems to cast it in a humanistic self-derived power to forgive rather than a religious or faith oriented worldview of divine empowerment.
Me and Orson Welles
A coming of age story of a young teenager trying to break into acting, who gets a break to be in Orson Welles’ 1937 production of Julius Caesar. This is before War of the Worlds, before his big film masterpiece Citizen Kane, the penultimate moment in Welles’ meteoric career. This appears to be a fictional romance set within an historical event. Zac Efron plays Richard, the young lead, who is 17 or so, still at home with his conventional suburban mother yet yearning for the romance of the theatre. He worms his way into the production by impressing Welles with his wit and confidence, and summarily falls for the troupe’s secretary, Sonja, played by Claire Danes. He ultimately loses his virginity to Sonja and consequently falls head over heels in love with her. He waxes eloquent with expressions of undying love worthy of the bard himself, that is, Shakespeare. But his innocence is lost when he discovers that Sonja sleeps with Welles and will do so with famous movie producer David Selznick, in order to advance her career.
Though Richard is crushed, he begins to re-notice a girl he had previously met, another innocent high school girl with ambitions of getting her poetry published. At the end, Richard meets back up with her and we get the impression that he will pursue this relationship as a sort of consolation prize, or return to innocence.
This film explores the loss of innocence in a head on collision with the cynical reality of the entertainment world of theatre, a world that perceives itself in the words of Welles, as “saving the dignity of man,” yet contrarily lives undignified immoral lives because, again in the words of Welles, “Our business is to create the best art. That’s all that matters.” Since the artist embodies moral truth in their art, they don’t need to actually live morally or truthfully in their personal lives. One is reminded of the cliché self delusion of the actor who thinks they can speak with authority because “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on television,” as if pretending confers any reality upon the individual’s experience.
Welles’ egocentric, self-obsessed, fame obsessed, prurient selfishness becomes the symbolic epitomy of this world that is larger than life, and indeed, a façade for real life. The Welles character is deliberately overplayed like a 1940s histrionic movie character, speaking as if he is always delivering lines. This embodies a “life as imitation of art” that reflects the ultimate fraudulence of that world. But this is all done lovingly by the writer/director, not with animosity for that world, but with a seeming longing for lost innocence amidst his own love of the art.
The Blind Side
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
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.
Julie & Julia
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.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
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
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
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).
World Trade Center
Rescue Drama. Based on the true story of two cops who survived the collapse of the twin towers and their rescue from the rubble. I must admit, I was amazed that Oliver Stone made this film. This is a very human exploration of courage, hope, pain and heroism that touched my soul with the value of family, faith and country that is usually feverishly attacked by Stone. He should be applauded for the beauty which he has created in this film. Perhaps one of the reasons why his conspiracy theorizing is absent is because he chose to focus exclusively on individual New Yorker’s reactions to the events and almost completely avoided the bigger picture of what is happening, even to the extent of reducing the planes hitting to a mere shadow on a sky scraper passing by, and the sound and thunder of the hits from a distance. Of course, it is entirely possible that Stone may believe the insane theories that the American government or “the Jews” did it, and this is merely the ant’s eye view of the common man. Be that as it may, this was a truly great story and film.
What I love about stories like this is the existential factor that places the heros in such peril that you project yourself into them and wonder how you might face death, or wonder how much of your own life you have squandered in missing what’s really important.
It is important to note that the Marine who went alone into the rubble was positively portrayed as a man of Christian faith, courage and duty, who entered the rubble as a symbol of how the Marines are the first to arrive and often unspoken heroes in that sense. When he walked into those ruins alone and willing to die to help find survivors, it may have been the most moving part of the film for me. He says, “You are my mission,” to the trapped officers, which reminded me of the symbolic heroism of Saving Private Ryan, “The mission is a man.” So there is this entirely positive symbolic portrayal of the military in this film that is diametrically opposed to his other films. Why? I don’t know. Maybe he considers the military only good if it rescues people from the aftermath of evil, rather than being a positive force against evil on the battlefield. But then again, this good Marine says that there will be pay back and the story notes that he went on to two tours of duty in Iraq, so that softens that theory. Anyway, thank you, Mr. Stone, for portraying Christian faith and the Marines as positive in this picture. God knows, the negative stereotypes in movies are more typical.
Some may claim that the heroism is weakened because the cops that got buried in the rubble didn’t do anything, they just went in and got covered. But this misses the point, They DID act heroically. They went in to the building to help. Sure, it was their job in a way, but it was also a choice. Not everyone went. And they were there trying to help people, so they are clearly heroes.
As for those who say, “it’s too soon,” Balderdash! It’s not soon enough. We need to revisit September 11 intimately, because already too many people have forgotten and have reduced the war on terror to political grandstanding and party politics.