Movies, Drama
Sean Penn is perhaps my favorite living male actor. I see films merely because he is in them. Milk, the interesting real life story of the first openly gay public official in the United States proved that even the most talented actor cannot portray every character. Despite all of his amazing talents, the task of playing a gay man lies beyond Penn’s skills. This is crystal clear at the end of film when we see a snipped of the real Harvey Milk for a mere 30 seconds: Here it becomes painfully apparent that Penn comes no where close to capturing the real Harvey Milk. Penn’s failure is a stark reminder that we all may misjudge the range of our abilities. While the film does a good job in telling the basic facts about the life of Milk, it does not illuminate at all the motive that led, Dan White, a fellow member of the city council kill Milk and the Major Moscone. The ending credits refer to a documentary called the “Life and Times of Harvey Milk.”Milk
Movies, Drama
In 1997, Heinrich Breloer made a spectacular docudrama (a documentary interspersed with acted drama) about the abduction of Hans Martin Schleyer, the head of the West German employer’s union, by the Red Army Fraction, a home-grown terrorist group, formed by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff. The Baader Meinhoff Complex goes all the way to the beginning of the group in the late 1960s and tells the story of the group largely from the imagined perspective of the terrorists. Breloer’s Todesspiel (Death Game) was compelling because he helped you understand why the terrorist acted the way they did and why the state reacted the way it did. Breloer interviewed the families of the terrorists and victims, as well as the politicians who tried to defend the state against the terrorist group that tried to bring the state to its knees and overthrow capitalist institutions in the name preventing another social injustice on the scale of Nazi Germany.The Baader Meinhoff Complex
Movies, Drama
The opening scene at the CERN physics laboratory where an experiment to create anti-matter (The God particle) takes place is visually stunning. Rome and its Catholic rituals provide a beautiful backdrop for the film. The next two hours, however, are a wild car chase through Rome that I found pretty annoying after a while. The last 25 minutes bring an unexpected turn of events that left me moderately satisfied with the film.Angels and Demons
Movies, Drama
The slim book on which the film is based is a wonderful read. Knowing the book makes the film much less exciting. The first hour feels very slow, particularly because book felt brisk. In the second hour the drama receives a jumpstart and you forget that you are sitting on perhaps a not so comfortable seat in the movie house. I read the book in one evening and savored the experience. After two hours watching The Reader I felt drained. A story nourished by the background of German society’s difficulty to come to terms with what Germans did between 1933 to 1945 was turned in the film into a story about how individual lives are messed up by experiences during childhood and youth. That story we have heard a million of times. Commercially the film benefitted from being made by Hollywood.The Reader
Movies, Drama
Last time I looked, India had the second largest film industry in the world. Yet very seldom a Bollywood movie reaches the eyes of a western audience. The genius behind Slumdog Millionaire is to make Western filmmakers translate a Indian based-story into a western film format. In the process, a magnificent film has arrived on American shores that will be a strong contender for the Oscars. The film is a fairy tale for adults with great dramatic and romantic force. Its wonderful story gives you a glimpse of India—with all its contradictions—that most Americans and Europeans would have never seen. The film covers a 25-year period in the life of Jamal and his slightly older brother Salim who grow up in the slums and later are pulled apart because of differences in personalities and circumstances. Emotionally the first part of the film reminded me of Cinema Paradiso, the second part of teenage delinquency epics, and the final part of modern game showSlumdog Millionaire
Movies, Drama
A psychologically pleasing story offers you some resolution at the end. John Patrick Shanley, the writer and director of Doubt, denies you this pleasure. He errs on the side of wanting to teach you too much. He wants you to be in doubt at the end of the film and this means never revealing what really happened. The film takes place in a catholic school in the Bronx in the 1960s. The head nun (Meryl Streep) suspects that the school’s priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is abusing his position of power. She harbors no doubt and uses all her political skill to get the priest to resign. In the end, after the priest is gone, she admits to her confidant that she is in doubt but we never find out if the priest did anything wrong. If you are someone who already knows that we never can be absolutely sure, the movie will not give you much.Doubt
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