Month: January 2020

Film Review: 1917 (2019)

A brown flagIt’s morning and the sky is gray with muted colors. The solders have no villain to blame and the greatest longing of everyone is to go home. Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) get called and they take on the mission.

The film’s sole vision of life is a nameless baby in a devastated city. The protagonists have Friendship, Loyalty, Brotherhood and Courage. It isn’t much, but it is what they need to charge past the rats and snipers and barbed wire and dead bodies.

1917 suggests that the audience recall the despair so that today’s challenges are not so oppressive.

Cinematographically, the movie is flowing and continuous. Much of the film is a single continuous shot. Most colors are chosen to have a low saturation. The screen is filled with browns and blacks, tans and grays. The result is a draining sadness.

1917 is full of sadness. The stark beauty of the devastation and the heightened emotions are what make the movie both repulsive and beautiful at the same time. One’s mind absorbs tension and danger from the screen. The bland colors are a muted reminder of how the extraordinary can become ordinary.

The spectacle follows winding trenches and broken walls. As the critical battle is approaching, a soldier is singing an incongruously beautiful song. Then, the urgency is redoubled as the mission might fail despite the herculean journey.

1917 is a really beautiful film. It successfully aspires to be a great work of art.

Don’t go when you want to have fun or to get joy and hopefulness. All I could do by the end was weep in empathy as Schofield looks at his distant family, hoping one day to return. As I listened to the closing credits pass, I was ready for change.

Film Review: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

A movie reelI believe the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was successful. It led me to think about how I can apply Fred Rogers’ lessons to my life. It showed how I might be a better person, one who is honorable and positive.

This story about the children’s television host Fred Rogers is not biographical. In other words, it’s not a biopic like 2018’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor? This present film is inspired by an article in Esquire magazine, Can You Say…Hero?, written by Tom Junod and published in November 1998. The movie imagines how Rogers might have interacted with the journalist as Junod researched the article.

Early in his interactions with Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks), the film’s version of the Esquire journalist, Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) is cynical. He wonders how much of Fred Rogers is real and whether his kindness is a performance and not sincere. The question isn’t directly answered. Viewers can watch the film and come to their own conclusions. Fred’s persistence in developing a relationship with the writer changes the journalist’s attitude. He ends up writing a positive article that doesn’t match his reputation for writing biting celebrity pieces.

One central conflict in the movie is between Lloyd Vogel and his father Jerry Vogel (Chris Cooper). The film follows the Vogels as they develop a relationship with Rogers. Fred Rogers presents the Vogel’s conflict as an opportunity to apply forgiveness. Despite his positive and prayerful attitude, Rogers doesn’t try to force the Vogels to reach a picture-book reconciliation.

In this film, Fred Rogers portrays an alternative view of what it means to be a man. One doesn’t need to be hard and rigid. You can care about other people yet stay true to yourself. Fred Rogers is persistent in meeting with the journalist, but they connect on Roger’s terms. Through that effort, the film shows that the humanity of both of them is worthy of honor.

This movie had many strong emotional moments. It is a film that I want to see again.

Review: Knives Out (2019)

A red knife stabbing downwardKnives Out is a rare movie that has the entire audience laughing as they leave the theater. The film is a whodunit hoping to solve why the prolific mystery writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) was found dead the morning after his 85th birthday party.

Thrombey’s family are all people you would love to hate. They’re self-absorbed and taking advantage of Harlan’s generosity. As the movie progresses, the audience learns that all of the family might have it out for the dead patriarch. Harlan Thrombey’s nurse, Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), gets tangled up in the whole affair.

A silent character is a gigantic display of hundreds of knives pointing toward a central hole. The interviews by the police take place in front of the art. It is ominous and adds to the tension.

Angela Landsbury and Tom Bosley from Murder, She Wrote make a quick cameo at Marta’s home—her family is obsessed with watching murder mysteries. When Harlan’s family speculates what happened, they choose different mystery novels as possible analogies to the current situation.

Someone unknown hired the renowned investigator Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) to investigate the death. Blanc is trying to find who fits in the center of the whole mystery. The family is initially wowed by his reputation, but no one knows what he’s up to.

This mystery is fun and clever. Any mystery that includes a spider wrangler in the credits isn’t self-conscious about the genre. I should have seen it a few weeks ago when I needed some good, unselfconscious laughs.