"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction at all, both are transformed.”

FOR "MISSION TO HAITI" CLICK ON "2010" IN THE ARCHIVES AND CLICK ON "APRIL"

MOVIE REVIEW: THE KING'S SPEECH

I was more than a little skeptical walking into the theater to see The King's Speech. It appeared to me that the movie was calculatingly put together to win an Oscar. It has every ingredient known to lure the Academy: rich history, the Royal Family, perfect costuming, impending war, a disability and a skilled and seasoned cast. Before I even sat down I was feeling manipulated. In case you haven’t noticed, I expect a lot from a movie. I’m restless by nature and for me to sit in a movie theater for over 2 hours; I want to be entertained and so engrossed, I don’t notice the time. Regardless of the movies’ occasional slow moments, the Weinstein brothers (The Reader, A Single Man and watch for Blue Vlanetine) pull it off. I loved it. The movie is about an unlikely but profound friendship. With all its lavishness, it is just that simple.

World War II is heating up and the recently crowned King George VI (played perfectly and brilliantly by Collin Firth), has a big problem. It's up to him to bring England together as a nation, to boost morale and strengthen its resolve against Hitler. But that's hard to do when you can’t string two words together. The king is seriously hampered by a very nasty speech impediment and he must give the crucial rallying speech to his nation and not only not stutter; he must give the speech of a lifetime. Can he do it?

Fortunately, at the advice of his always-supportive wife, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (Helena Bonham Carter) he's been meeting with a groundbreaking speech instructor, Lionel Logue - actually an unsuccessful actor, played by Geoffrey Rush (who manages to do incredible things with this role). The relationship between the two men, although adversarial at first, inevitably develops into something quite close, and crucial. Yes, there are the peripheral details of the war, the stammer, the cold and abusive father but it is the friendship of these two men that is not just the heart of the film, but also the point of the film.

The period set decoration and costumes are impeccable. The direction of Tom Hooper (best known for helming the HBO John Adams mini-series) is never dull, as he keeps things moving along at a respectable pace. Along the way, Michael Gambon and Guy Pearce show up in supporting roles as members of the royal family. Timothy Spall plays Winston Churchill for the second time in his career (previously in Jackboots On Whitehall) The involvement of these actors is always a good thing.

You will walk out of the movie theater thinking, “This is not the best movie I have ever seen but an excellent one”. And… it will stay with you long after you leave the theater. I love that.

Lionel Logue and his wife Mertyle Gruenert

p.s. In a newly-discovered handwritten letter on Buckingham Palace notepaper, dated February 28, 1952, Queen Elizabeth told Logue that her husband had owed him a debt of gratitude for helping him not merely with his stutter, but his whole life.

"I think that I know perhaps better than anyone just how much you helped the King, not only with his speech, but, through that, his whole life, and outlook on life," she wrote to Logue one year before his death. "I shall always be deeply grateful to you for all you did for him." Of the King, she added: "He was such a splendid person, and I don't believe that he ever thought of himself at all. I did so hope that he might have been allowed a few years of comparative peace after the many anguished years he had to battle through so bravely. But it was not to be." Queen Elizabeth's letter to Logue was unearthed by the Australian speech therapist's grandson, Mark, among family papers a few months ago.

MOVIE REVIEW: True Grit

I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t love this movie as much as everybody else. I liked it, I didn’t love it. In “True Grit,” the Coen brothers play it very straight. The masters of caustic satire return to the western, but not with the tension of “Blood Simple” or the bizarre wickedness of “No Country for Old Men.” Instead, their adaptation of the 1968 Charles Portis novel (and not, it must be stressed, the 1969 Academy Award-winning John Wayne vehicle) is largely a return to the genre’s classical form.

The elements for a success — albeit not of the sort one typically expects from the Coens — are there: sharp banter, flawed lawmen and the imposingly beautiful Roger Deakins-helmed images of characters set against the endless Texan (Arkansas in the tale) countryside. In true Coen fashion, a classic is repeatedly evoked: “The Night of the Hunter,” in the haunting rendition of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” on the soundtrack, figures facing an unknown, tangible terror and the ways pockets and bursts of light illuminate the characters’ hardened faces.

Yet in spite of all the movie does right, it succumbs to a pervasive rote quality that latches onto the journey of United States Marshal Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) and 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), who has hired the former to avenge the murder of her father.

“True Grit” is never funny enough or tense enough for the approach to work. The humor is found in Mr. Bridges’s misguided approach to Cogburn, playing him as an indecipherable drunk, and the character’s growling about Texas versus Arkansas boys, etc., with Mr. Damon’s better-conceived egotistical LaBoeuf. The search for Chaney is secondary to the squabbling and as such — despite the best efforts of newcomer Hailee Steinfeld — never takes on the urgency that should accompany the pursuit. The danger of such an ambitious sojourn through lawless territory is submerged by its overarching one-dimensionality, the bad guy’s overall lack of screen time and the concurrent downgrading of the proceedings from a life-or-death struggle to a fun adventure for the trio.

If you’re dead set on seeing it, you better run out and see it soon. I don’t see it sticking around for long regardless of its great reviews. It is not worth renting as the best thing about the movie, the cinematography, will be lost on a TV (unless you have a 72 inch flat screen).

MOVIE REVIEW: 127 HOURS

Whenever I read a book I always wonder, “Would this book make a good movie”? But when I read Between a Rock and a Hard Place, the true story of Aron Rolston, the young outdoorsman who gets trapped at the bottom of a canyon with his arm pinned beneath a rock, it never even crossed my mind. What kind a movie could it possibly be? Well, director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) figures out how to pull it off, turning 127 Hours into one of the better movies of the year. The movie does however, completely hinge on the outstanding performance of James Franco. Go figure. Franco is an actor who has never really done anything great (he’s Harry Osborn in the Spiderman series). That is of course, until now.

Franco plays Ralston, a geeky guy whose obsession isn’t video games or computers, his obsession is the outdoors. An engineer by profession Aron dreams of making his living as a guide and when we meet him, he’s home from work and packing up for a weekend to be spent under the stars and sun, wandering endless, remote canyons all alone. He’s confident in his abilities, perhaps with good reason, so he doesn’t bother to tell anyone where he’s going. Yet even an experienced hiker, with a head full of survival knowhow, can’t prepare for everything.

We spend a few moments with Aron, before he’s trapped, as he races across the wilderness on his bike. On his way out towards solitude he’ll encounter two pretty hikers. They’ll invite him to a Scooby Doo theme party, and fantasizing about what it might have been like if he’d shown up is one of the many things that’ll keep him going during his long imprisonment. Most of the movie is spent there with him, trapped beneath a rock, for 127 hours. The only thing on screen is Franco’s Ralston, with no one to talk to, nothing to do but sit and struggle and despair. Somehow, Ralston never gives in to panic; he’s too capable, too smart. That doesn’t mean, however, he has a way out. Stuck there all alone for nearly a week, Aron will have plenty of time to think of everything he did wrong. The Swiss Army knife he failed to pack, the Gatorade bottle he left in his truck, the phone call from his mom he didn’t answer. Eventually he’ll have a choice to make. By the time he makes it, it’s almost not a choice, just a final desperate act to survive at any cost.

Another filmmaker may have wondered away from the one place, and the one character but it would have been a mistake. I’m sure he realized James Franco’s Oscar worthy performance was good enough to keep the focus on him for almost the entire movie. Boyle attempts to find meaning in Ralston’s predicament, and he does. What has he done to find himself in this place? Ultimately Aron admits, everything. “The rock” he says, “has been waiting for me”. We get to experience what it would be like to have to make the gruesome life and death decision and then we watch him carry it out. You must see it once but I promise, you will not want to see it again.

The real Aron Ralston

For MISSION TO HAITI click "April" in the Archives

Rekonnesans~Reconnaissant~Gratitude  Photo by SB

MOVIE REVIEW: LET ME IN

Let Me In was not what I expected but I loved it anyway. I thought I was going to be scared and I was so looking forward to it. Ever since I was a little girl, I loved when a movie scared me to death; shaking at the edge of my seat, my heart bounding fast inside my chest, my breathing would get quick and shallow. It doesn’t happen much anymore – not in the movie theater anyway;)  I think the last time I was really frightened  at a movie was in 2002: The Ring. Never-the-less, Let Me In is an excellent movie. Its use of mood and atmosphere along with its straight-forward approach to the subject matter makes for an eerie product that manages to crawl under your skin.

This is a thoughtful and intelligent remake of the Swedish horror film; Let the Right One In (2008). Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) takes on John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel, an exceptional piece of work by the way, and turns it into something much better than '08 version. It’s not that the original isn’t good; it’s good. But the remake is better. How often does that happen? Sadly, almost never. Lucky for us, we have an opportunity to see a movie that quietly but expertly gives us a masterful study of loneliness that spares nothing in its depiction of the need for blood and belonging.

Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee – The Road) lives with his mom (Cara Buono), an overly religious woman with a drinking problem. We never see her face in focus, emphasizing Owen's sense of being alone - clever. He is small for his age, relentlessly bullied at school, sometimes brutally. For comfort he heads out into the freezing night and hangs around the empty playground of his apartment complex. Alone, until one night a girl and an older man move into the apartment next door. Soon the girl, Abby (a remarkably talented, relative newcomer, Chloe Moretz – Kick Ass), joins him in the cold dark, barefoot, impervious to the elements. "We can't be friends," she warns, but to a boy as alone as Owen, such caution is futile. He craves companionship of any kind, and in Abby, as unusual as she might be; he thinks he might have found some. When Owen asks if she will be his girlfriend, “I’m not a girl” she replies. But that’s OK too. Abby encourages Owen to stand up for himself at school, with the implication that, should he need it, she can help him. This is a relationship of horribly wounded people willing to look past each other's imperfections - that's putting it mildly in Abby's case. Smit-McPhee and Moretz do such an outstanding job of getting that across in their performances, I think it’s fair to say, this movie would not work without them.

The vampire element is underplayed here - it's given obligatory moments of ghoulish bloodletting, but never really viewed as a true threat or supreme evil. Instead, we are supposed to view the horror of the real world as seen through the eyes of these children and marvel at how they could possibly survive. In fact, Let Me In is one of the best, boldest coming of age statements ever. It centers on the angst that drives the pre-adolescent, the uneasy feeling of being an outsider and alone in your nonconformity, and then highlights its harmful consequences. Emotions are expressed in an overflow of blood instead of inane psychological bullshit and that's what makes this film brilliant. Let Me In is one of the better films of 2010 but unfortunately has a very limited audience. Go see it fast. I don’t think it will be in the theaters for long; not bloody enough for teenagers and to plodding for the average moviegoer.