Friday Noon Movie Club: "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"

As I’m about to watch my eldest make the 8^th grade graduation march into high school, I’m feeling my age. What better to make me feel young again than to watch a group of more mature folks taking a big life adventure? I felt younger the minute I walked in the theater, where I was about 20 years younger than any of the other 30 people there.

Then the previews began, which is always sort of a crapshoot—I’m never sure what I will be subjected to in previews. There were four previews before The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and I want to see all of them. The Words, in which an author’s fiction is somehow intruding on reality, Hyde Park on the Hudson, which features Bill Murray as FDR and Laura Linney as something mysteriously between a head maid and a mistress, Beasts of the Southern Wild (okay, this one I’m a little uncertain about) some sort of sci-fi apocalyptic story about a young child in Louisiana deltas, seems to involve a Katrina-style hurricane and some aurochs, an ancient ox-type creature which (I happen to know from my Bible editing gigs) are translated in the King James Bible as unicorns. And Ruby Sparks, which looks like the plot of the aforementioned The Words combined with the quirkier style of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—a young author creates a female character who comes to life.

What did all this teach me? It seems that I am squarely in the demographic of a movie aimed at the AARP audience (no offense to the many of my friends who are already there!). Look what a few good “Masterpiece Theater” miniseries will do to you. My advice: stay away from PBS. It ages you. Watch Step Up 17 instead, or Paranormal Activity 35, because if you watch too much Downton Abbey or Bleak House, you are likely to end up like me. Previews aimed at senior citizens are hitting my sweet spot.

Back to the movie. As I expected, there are lots of predictable things about the story. But that’s not what I was there for. I was there for the actors.

The premise is that the Marigold Hotel is advertised as a newly renovated luxury hotel for seniors citizens, but the renovations have not yet been completed. Most of the new arrivals take this remarkably well after the first moments of disbelief. In my own experience, people expecting luxury are not easily mollified when introduced to something lesser. But this is fantasy.

Judi Dench is Evelyn, a luminous as a widow who is looking to make a new life for herself. Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton are Douglas and Jean Ainslie, a long-married couple who can’t afford the kind of retirement they want in England. Tom Wilkinson is Graham, a gay man who grew up in India and spent the rest of his life in England wondering about the people he left behind. Madge (Celia Imrie) is on the hunt for her next, preferably rich, husband. Ronald Pickup plays Norman, a lecherous man who is looking to ease his loneliness, if only for one night. And Maggie Smith plays, Muriel, a bitter and racist woman who needs a hip replacement and can get it more quickly and easily in India. That’s your ensemble cast, an aging version of New Year’s Eve, or Valentine’s Day, or yes, even Love Actually.

Tom Wilkinson is wonderful in his role. Loved him. His character is the best at letting us see India as a place of its own, with pros and cons, without all the drama of the new traveler. Bill Nighy’s Douglas is loveable, if not unique, as a husband who has disappointed his wife but is finding new energy from the change of setting. Penelope Wilton (Matthew Crawley’s mother on Downton), on the other hand, has a thankless role as his resentful and sanitation-obsessed wife who can’t adjust to their new life. It doesn’t matter how well she acts it, the part has nothing to empathize with. Maggie Smith fares better, though I would have liked to see more of her character’s development. Madge and Norman are mostly there for comic relief and for rounding out the cast, but they are not terribly likeable either. Thankfully they are also forgettable.

For a travel addict such as myself, there are parts of this movie that function as something like a drug fix. I am in the early stages of planning my India itinerary as I type, though I wish that the movie showed us more. The fantasy aspect of the film shows through, though, in the quick reference to extra trips to the bathroom after another exotic meal. Much as I want to see all of the world, two rounds with the vicious amoeba were enough to convince me that caution with food is not so overrated, and germophobia is the one way I could relate to the character of Jean Ainslie.

Dev Patel, who played the young man in Slumdog Millionaire, plays the manager of the hotel. Sometimes the gestures and exasperation are just more caricature; other times he is allowed to play the character as a real human being struggling to overcome his life’s obstacles.

I recently heard a podcast that talked about how older people are portrayed in the media. Elderly characters are usually a farce, a ridiculous caricature. Some of these characters rise above that, nicely so. Some do not. I will say, though, that the people who shared the theater with me that day seemed to really like the movie. As the credits rolled, one woman said “Finally, something for us.”

This movie is basically fluff, albeit fluff full of my favorite British actors. There is a little too much sadness to make it complete fluff, and a little too much slapstick to make it truly resonate. While I enjoyed the time in the theater, I left wishing for something more satisfying, and frankly, more hopeful for my future.  

Friday Noon Movie Club: "Bully"

Last Friday I gave the Friday Noon Movie Club the opportunity to vote on what movie I would see. They sent me to see Bully, and a few of them even kindly came with me. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the documentary. I’ve been feeling like bullying was the new trendy topic, something that comes up because parents always need something to worry about.

I was a tomboy in elementary school, playing tackle football and getting into the occasional fight. Fighting is an inept description of what I was up to—I’d get in one good punch and run, fast. I don’t think my fighting qualified me as a bully, since I tended to be more vigilante than bully. (Think along the lines of the 80s movie My Bodyguard.) I was very self-righteous, very big and tall, and I had a tendency to jump in when necessary until I was in 5^th or 6^th grade. For example, when my scrawny 2^nd grade boyfriend got teased by the bigger boys, I could take them. I probably stepped over the line a bit more in the fight I had with the neighbor girl when I was 5 or 6. I distinctly remember hitting her over the head with a metal shovel and yelling “Get off my property!”

It only took a few minutes of Bully to tell me that it’s about more than just your average playground standoff.

The filmmakers interviewed several children, mostly middle school age, who have been victims of bullying, as well as their parents. They also followed a young man named Alex, who lives in Sioux City, Iowa. They showed him at home, on the school bus and at school. Kids tormented him with terrible words and physical abuse. I had some idea of what it was going to be like, but I was unprepared for the viciousness of the verbal attacks. Some victims are encouraged to stand up for themselves, but that’s just not an option for everyone.

I happen to love and live with two middle-schoolers of my own at the moment. Middle school can be a place where the very best in humankind is displayed—kids are starting to think more critically and they are not jaded, so their idealism and faith development can be beautiful to see. It is also a place that gives Calvinists some powerful evidence for total depravity. The instinct in some to gain, use and abuse power is strong, as is the instinct to stay silent and safe in others.

Parents, teachers and other youth leaders would benefit from Bully. Parents will be particularly affected by the family members who show pictures and videos of the victims as babies and toddlers, talking about them with the same fierce bond of love any parent feels. That aspect of it might be somewhat lost on younger viewers, but their grief would not be.

I’m not sure I’d take just any middle-school student to see it, because the movie includes interviews with the families of several victims who have taken their own lives. While that’s not depicted as a good solution, it might still plant the seed in the mind of a child who is truly struggling—after all, for whatever other consequences there are to suicide, those victims are not being bullied anymore.

For a child who might have a tendency to bully, however, Bully might help them empathize with the victims. With some preparation and some debriefing, parents could use this as a tool to open up a discussion the topic.

At Friday’s screening, there were the four of us, plus a class of high school students who seemed to be paying close attention. Unfortunately for them, they must not have had time for the entire movie, so with about half an hour left, the teachers silently stood up, made a hand motion in the air, and they all filed quietly out. I wish they had been able to see the last portion, which made it clear that the best way to fight bullying is to stand together against it.

There is some feeling of hope at the end as victims and the families of victims gather and speak out against bullying, encouraging young people to stand up for the victims. Though the moviemakers might not recognize it, the film cries out for the real answer: we all need to recognize the image of God in every person.

Friday Noon Movie Club: "A Separation"

This past Friday I was joined by two Friday Movie friends, and we had the entire theater to ourselves. It must be what Siskel and Ebert used to feel like, sitting in that screening room. Except without all the power. And I bet their daughters didn’t call them in the middle of the movie to beg a ride home so they wouldn’t have to get on the bus. Where was I? Oh, the movie.

A Separation is an Iranian film about a problem very familiar to the Western world—a marriage that is being pulled apart by the desire to do what is best for both a child and an ailing parent. No simple thing.

Nader and Simin are a married couple who, from all appearances, respect and love each other. They have been bringing up their daughter, Termeh, to be an independent, intelligent young woman. They’ve also been making plans to leave Iran for another, more open country for their daughter.

The trouble is, Nader’s father has Alzheimer’s. He’s past the point of recognizing his son, though he still calls his daughter-in-law by name. Nader cannot bear to leave him in the care of someone else. Simin leaves, going to stay with her mother with the expressed intention of leaving the country before the visa expires. Termeh is caught in between them, doing what she can to keep her parents together.

In the midst of their frustrations, Nader hires a woman to help care for his father while he is gone for the day. This woman finds the job very difficult for several reasons. She suffers fear of breaking religious law by cleaning the father when he soils himself. She is pregnant, she has a young daughter who comes to work with her, and she is married to an unemployed, hot-tempered man who does not know about her job. A disagreement between employer and the employee leads to a legal battle.

The film gives insight into daily life in Iran, at least for the moderately well-to-do. It gives a glimpse of the criminal justice system there, as well as the precarious nature of any life, subject to forces that we cannot control.

The separation of the title has many implications. The separation of the married couple. Separation between parents and children, between upper and lower class, between those with power and those without. The separations are symbolized by constantly opening and closing doors. Whenever anyone decides to speak the truth to another, they put someone else out of the room before they speak, especially the young girls. The true separations come when anyone chooses to lie to protect themselves, to make themselves look better. Every time an untruth comes out of someone’s mouth, a new separation is born.

This is a wrenching film, but an unflinching look at the struggle between self-protection in the name of safety and self-sacrifice in the name of integrity. The characters are well-rounded and true, as are the performances. Nader’s love and honor of his afflicted father is heartbreaking and beautiful. And on top of it all, you get to see into the daily life of a family in Iran, a world we rarely get to see.

Friday Noon Movie Club: The Hunger Games

There’s no way you’ve missed it, the movie version of The Hunger Games has arrived! The Friday Noon Movie Club was a fun gathering of 6 women, while my rather jealous teens toiled away at school. And I have to say, there was none of the humiliation that exists when a 40-something woman enters a theater to see a movie based on adolescent literature, like when said woman might show up at a Twilight screening. Not that I would know anything about that. Ahem.

As the mother of two young fans, I’ve been nervous for a while about how this movie would come out, wondering how the violent nature of the books would come across on film. And even more so wondering how I would deal with a disappointed daughter if it was more than I was willing to allow her to watch. But I had hope, because Suzanne Collins, the author of the trilogy, was one of the screenwriters, and I hoped that her sensibilities would continue onto the screen.

My faith in her was rewarded. The movie stayed true to the books, showing violence in a way that does not glorify it. Indeed, it does the opposite, showing the sacredness to human life, and the fact that everyone involved in violence is changed by it. The Hunger Games is a horrific tale of societal oppression and mob mentality, with elements of Roman gladiators, Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery,” and Lord of the Flies, among many others.

Yet the selling point of both the book and the movie is the strong female lead, Katniss Everdeen, a resourceful young woman who will sacrifice herself for those she loves. And Katniss is ably played by Jennifer Lawrence, who was also wonderful as Katniss’s present-day alter ego in Winter’s Bone, a movie from a couple of years ago.

Other characters are well-played, but not well-developed. The constraints of time appear to have cut much of the back story on many of the characters, which proves frustrating to fans of the novels. For instance, Cinna did not play a big enough part. Being a closet Lenny Kravitz fan, I was sort of amazed at how restrained his performance was. I have no idea how it plays to someone who doesn’t know the books, because, having read them, my memory fills in any missing information.

I “enjoyed” the movie, for lack of a better term. I don’t know what to do with that. Is it inspiring? Not really, because it’s such a sad story, even if Katniss does come through. Is it uplifting? No. But there’s something appealing about it, and it’s not just the excitement of the danger and competition. It has to do with Katniss’s refusal to submit to the expectations placed on her, and her refusal to succumb to the baser nature that shows up in some of her opponents. The on-screen treatment of her relationship with the young girl, Rue, is one of the highlights of the movie.

I felt satisfied, if saddened, after watching, but I do wonder if I can tolerate watching the second and third books turned into movies. But I’m not sure I’ll be able to stay away, either.

One more thing—I downloaded the soundtrack today, which was put together by T Bone Burnett (O Brother Where Art Thou?, Walk the Line, Cold Mountain). On first listen, it appears to be a fabulous combination of music, including songs from Neko Case, the Punch Brothers, the Civil Wars, Taylor Swift, Arcade Fire, The Decemberists, The Carolina Chocolate Drops…an amazing list. Even if you don’t want to watch the movie, check out the music.

Friday Noon Movie Club: Jeff, Who Lives at Home

The Friday Noon Movie Club met last Friday (yes, it’s taken me this long) to see Jeff, Who Lives at Home. I was joined by three adventurous moviegoers who had little idea of what they were seeing and were even up for lunch afterward!

Jeff, Who Lives at Home, is about a lovable, pot-smoking, slacker manchild (Jason Segel) who lives in his mother’s basement. He’s watched M. Night Shyamalan’s movie “Signs” a few too many times and is trying to read the signs in his own life.

At the same time, his older brother, Pat (Ed Helms), has lost track of his own sense of purpose, which is leading to desperate attempts at good times and a failing marriage. At her office, Mom (Susan Sarandon) is lonely and disappointed in the way that her life has turned out. She despairs that Jeff will not even be able to accomplish a small repair job in her absence. Each of them are still grieving the long-ago loss of their father and husband, keeping each other at arm’s length in different ways.

The prevailing theme of this movie is Jeff’s search for his fate, his destiny. At different points, old lines like “things happen for a reason” are dragged out, but only Jeff really seems to believe this. Though he is clueless about the world, he is kind and compassionate to the people around him, believing the best in everyone.

Brother Pat, who for all his problems is living the more “normal” life, is angry and bitter. Jeff patiently tries to help him see what he is missing, even though Jeff seems almost completely unable to make any move for himself. Until this day, when he receives a sign.

There is an interesting use of imagery that seems rather baseless. Everyone gets “dunked,” as one of my fellow moviegoers termed it. One gets baptized through the fire sprinklers, two more end up diving into some water. And Jeff is a 30-something single man who helps people and even has a carpentry job to attend to. Not sure what to do with all of that.

Should you see it? Maybe, maybe not. Offensive language abounds; it’s rated R for a reason. But humor bubbles out of this strange brew of painful family dysfunction and corny sentiment.

The last time my youth group small group met, we talked about how God communicates with us, following the Lenten service about questions we have for God. Talking with them, though I can point to concrete answers to prayer and ways that I’ve felt God’s leading, it was still felt sort of nebulous to explain how. So while I laugh at Jeff’s seeking for supernatural “signs,” I can’t help but think that I can understand how he feels, wishing for something to tell me exactly what to do next. So it seems to me that this movie helped me think through what it means to look for direction in life for those who don’t feel God’s hand leading them through it.

Friday Noon Movie Club: "The Artist"

This week’s Friday Noon Movie Club pick was The Artist. Now, I knew things were a little different this time around, because instead of walking into a theater populated mainly by middle-aged men attending stag (which, though I am middle-aged myself, and each time I go I might find myself attending stag, still creeps me out), the theater held 3 or 4 couples, of decidedly older ages. Seemed like sort of a sweet beginning!


And then I was joined by 4 friends. We started off the afternoon by admiring the multitude of rocks on the left ring finger of one lucky lady (and no, he didn’t go to Jared). Going to be an exciting summer!

We watched a very random assortment of previews--several of which I've seen approximately 25 times now. I have to say, I'm very curious about Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Maybe it's just Ewan McGregor. I'll be belting out songs from Moulin Rouge any moment now.

Okay, the first thing you need to know if you are going to see The Artist in a theater: a silent movie may not be the best place to eat popcorn. The Artist is a black and white silent movie. While there is music, just as in the old silent films, it’s not blasted through the stereo system in the same way to which we are accustomed, at least not at our showing. Crunching popcorn suddenly takes on a new resonance. One friend must have left the theater with an almost full bag of popcorn, because I don’t think she ate more than a handful during the movie.

It’s also not a great place to have your cell phone go off unexpectedly, as happened to the lady on my right. In fact, it’s not a great place to whisper about the movie or talk at all. On the other hand, there’s no need for anyone to whisper loudly, “What’d he say?” because he didn’t say anything.

I’m a word person, so it kills me to not know what the character is saying. I found myself tensing up at times, just waiting for some words to appear on the screen to let me know what the heck they were saying! But after a while, it becomes the norm, and you develop a new patience with the story.

Now on to the movie. On the surface, The Artist is a throwback to the old days, using the old methods of showing story and character without actually hearing the actors speak. George Valentin is a silent film star loved by legions of fans. We get to know George and his life through lots of exaggerated facial expressions, shadows, reflections, newspaper headlines (Who’s That Girl? is plastered across the paper that his distant wife is holding in front of her face), and other hints. George meets an aspiring actress, Peppy, who charms him, and everyone else. George is himself entertaining and charming, but he is also a proud man.

His pride makes it very difficult to deal with the sudden change that movies with sound bring to the industry. He struggles to keep his career moving forward, losing much through things he can and can’t control. Meanwhile, Peppy is moving up in the ranks, a rising star in the new “talkie” medium. You can’t miss the wonderfully filmed scene where the fading George meets Peppy on a staircase—George is going down, while Peppy is going up. People are moving quickly around them, all looking like they are going places. George doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

It’s a tribute, I think, to Jean Dujardin, who played George, that I liked his character as much as I did, in spite of his pride and self-absorption. Peppy lives up to her name, as played by Berenice Bejo, a lively young woman with an incredible smile.

This movie is partly about the transition from silent films to talking pictures, and it is partly a romance. It is also an exploration of the way we find our own identity, often falling into the trap of believing what is reflected in the eyes of others or believing our own press.

Another aspect of the story is our consumption of celebrity, putting one person high on a pedestal, then letting them tumble when something new comes along. We have witnessed this over and over in show business, and it’s even true for the high school football star who never quite makes it in college. Chris Smit, a professor at Calvin College, has written a book about this called The Exile of Britney Spears. He focuses in particular on the public’s consumption of young female stars, making Britney Spears his case study.

So there is more to this movie than meets the eye. But even what meets the eye is a movie that is sweet, funny, and has both charm and depth. And a really cute Jack Russell terrier.

**Odd sidenote—as I wrote this, Jean Dujardin showed up in an Artist skit on "Saturday Night Live"! Still pretty charming.

Friday Noon Movie Club: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Friday was an exciting day, as I had a record five joiners taking up my row. We saw Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer’s book of the same title (and he just happens to be coming to the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin in April!). Out of the six of us, four and a half have read the book—one has only read part of it, and one has yet to crack it. We raided the bathroom for toilet paper for those who forgot to bring tissue and found our place.
I’ll start with this: I really loved the book. It’s a little strange, a bit surreal. So the criticism I’ve been reading about the movie scared me off for a while—I was nervous to watch the movie version, afraid it would take away from my memory of the book. After the nomination for Best Picture was announced, in spite of all the slams it has taken in the media, I gathered my courage.

Often, when I really love a book, the movie version really has no chance of living up to it. And with the negative reviews, I had pretty much written this one off before I bought my ticket. I’m sort of glad for that.

My expectations were so low that I was pleasantly surprised by the film. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t have the same depth as the book. But the peculiarity of the young boy, Oskar, and his story remains intact, and I appreciated that. His search to find some sort of meaning in the horror that has profoundly changed his life is universal.

The Bible study group I am part of recently began studying the book of Job. We spent some time this week remembering times in our lives when we also have searched for meaning in suffering, searched for God in the suffering. We haven’t got it all figured out, but we share a gratitude that we have God and his people walking with us in those times. Loud and Close shows the importance of the people walking with us, and that gets half the story right, a step in the right direction.

Thomas Horn plays Oskar in a roll that demands a lot from a young actor and from the audience. Oskar is grieving the loss of his father. He is also somewhere on the autism spectrum, and he sometimes gets shrill and freaked out. This is understandable, but it might have been more effective if he wasn’t narrating constantly. Sometimes we might just need to have seen and not heard so much. Also, until you know that he has these issues, you would think that he’s a spoiled rotten kid who says and does whatever he wants, which sets up the viewer who has not read the book to dislike him almost immediately.

Oskar explores the city of New York, calling on strangers in a quest to discover something about his father. The city plays itself beautifully, by which I mean I enjoyed the filming of New York. One scene, in which a frightened Oskar fights his fear of bridges, shows him running across the bridge as a train speeds past him and the cars speed by even faster. It seems symbolic of his experience—everyone moving faster, passing him by, yet he is making his way eventually.

Viola Davis plays the woman he calls on first, and she’s fantastic in her small roll. Max Von Sydow gives great expression to his character, the renter at grandma’s house. Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks are good as the parents, as far as that goes, but they definitely take a back seat in the movie. I was glad for one scene in which Hanks, playing the oh-so-perfect father to Oskar, shows some slight frustration in dealing with his son’s hesitation to engage. A little more of that realism might have counteracted the sentimentalism. Bullock as mom has a few more honest scenes that she carries out well.

When the movie was finished, the theater emptied out but for the six of us and a few of us regained our composure. We tried to figure out how we felt about it. One of the reasons that the movie doesn’t carry the same weight as the book is that an important storyline was dropped. There’s no way that the movie could have covered all the written territory, and so this was probably inevitable. But the grandfather’s life story in the book adds so much to the reader’s experience, and we missed it.

The one among us who had not read the book at all told us she was a bit put off at the beginning by the imagined scenes of a man falling from one of the towers in 9/11. One friend suggested that the novel’s use of the image is more subtle, and I think that’s true. Also, the novel is more fragmented chronologically, and the movie is more straightforward in its time sequence. Somehow that takes some of the mystery out of it. One other observation: There is a certain amount of suspension of belief that is required of both the book and the movie, and I know that some dislike the book for that reason. That is probably even truer for the movie.

Is this Best Picture? Nope. It wraps up a sad story too neatly, too superficially. I’ve never lived in New York; I didn’t lose anyone in 9/11, so I can’t judge how I would feel if I had. Certainly it was a tragedy in my life like none other I’ve experienced, but perhaps a more direct connection would change the way I looked at the movie. But with the rather low expectations I came in with, I felt that it was worth watching. And just as the director would have wanted, my tissue was well used.

Friday Noon Movie Club: Take Shelter

This week’s Friday Noon Movie Club witnessed the first ever attendance by an adult male! This brave man and his lovely wife joined me for a couple of hours of ominous dread, as I had promised in the weekly announcement. We went to see Take Shelter, a film about a man who may be having visions warning of coming disaster, or he may be on the brink of a psychotic break. Is he a prophet, madman or both?


Curtis is a hard-working man with all the kinds of shelter we look for in life: his own home, a good job as a foreman on a construction drilling crew, good health insurance, friends, and a good marriage to his near-saint of a wife, Samantha. The two are working through the hurdles of bringing up their young, deaf daughter, Hannah, acting as shelter to her as well, as they learn how to use sign language and try to help her connect socially.

That kind of shelter is what we all hope for, often called the American Dream. But Curtis’s fears are becoming much larger than that shelter can handle. And the only way he can find to combat his fear is to protect his family. He becomes obsessed with building a tornado shelter, among other measures. His sources of protection strain his relationships, including his marriage.

This movie is strange and different. It is also extremely well made. The acting is stellar. Michael Shannon plays the perfect everyman—average looks, no particular charisma, but you somehow know that Curtis is a good man, a strong man, an honest man, even as he tries to hide what is happening to him. Jessica Chastain is luminous (and what a year she’s had—The Help, The Tree of Life, The Debt), giving us a demonstration of the Proverbs 31 woman at work, providing for her family in every way she can. I’m trying not to hate her.

Director Jeff Nichols lets us into the horror of Curtis’s fears. After a few of his nightmares I was afraid that I’d stumbled into a horror movie by accident, wondering where this would go. I don’t do horror. But while they took me to the limit of my comfort, they never went beyond it. The nightmares themselves are not the focal point. It’s the fear they inspire and the reactions to that fear that the movie builds on.

There are effective images of ascending and descending, going towards light and away from it, out in the open or underground. Even his job working with drilling makes you feel that somehow he is probing the earth, disturbing or trying to break through something hard and ungiving.

As Curtis goes through this trying experience, he turns on the TV only to see chemical spills on the news. His search for help leads him to a counselor at the hospital who uses a room covered with medical posters warning of HIV and H1N1. All of the everyday horror that becomes normal to us intensifies his feelings of dread—dread that he is either mentally ill or that something horrible is about to happen.

Hiding his fears only disconnects him from everyone else. They don’t understand what is happening, and they react badly. In one scene, members of his community see exactly how afraid he is, and his vulnerability and fear are palpable.

I’ve been thinking about why the movie includes a deaf daughter. There is one obvious plot reason that I won’t tell you about. But I think the disconnectedness that the parents know she experiences, even when she doesn’t know it, is part of the picture somehow. The inability to communicate or to hear what others try to communicate definitely plays a part in the story.

Last fall I saw Martha Marcy May Marlene, in which a young woman is taken in by and becomes a victim of a cult. I wouldn’t recommend it, because it was too disturbing. I wish I could un-see it. But I mention it here because between Take Shelter and the four M’s, the American Dream takes an allegorical beating. Not because it’s a bad thing in and of itself, but because it’s not enough to sustain you when you face the valley of the shadow of death.

If you enjoy movies that leave you wondering, and that give you food for thought for days, see Take Shelter. Take Shelter manages to nail the dread without leaving me feeling violated or hopeless. If you do see it, please let me know what you thought, particularly of the ending. This one will likely be on my mind for a couple of weeks.

Friday Noon Movie Club: "The Iron Lady"

In the 1980s I was floundering through the social minefields of middle school and high school. I knew there was a Margaret Thatcher, and I understood clearly from my Dallas circles that Ronald Reagan was the savior of the US, and I sort of knew that the two of them were sort of connected. There, you pretty much have the sum total of my political awareness in the 1980s.

For a brief while this morning, I sat alone in an empty movie theater waiting for The Iron Lady to begin. I’m not put off by seeing a movie alone, and I wasn’t expecting anyone to make the drive in the aftermath of last night’s big snow, but as I waited for the movie to begin I found myself a little worried about the solitude. Political movies are the kind I should not be seeing and evaluating alone. Luckily for me, one of my neighbors braved the snow and joined me. In fact, she had lived briefly in England in 1986, and she was able to inform me as to who some of the characters were, as when Alexander Haig was referred to as Al, and I could not identify him. So take my review here with a grain of salt, politically speaking.

Meryl Streep gets rave reviews for her portrayal of Thatcher, but the movie itself gets very mixed reviews. One criticism I’ve seen several places is that the movie is too apolitical, which I’ll come back to. Another mentioned that by reducing her popular opposition to footage of protesters surrounding our main character as she sits in the car with her beloved husband, we can only empathize with her and see protesters as nasty, faceless, no-class hoardes. And in the days of the Occupy movements, this is inappropriate. Point taken.

One critic mentioned that if it weren’t for Meryl Streep’s performance, this would be no more than a TV movie. That one I take issue with. While it’s not The King’s Speech in grandeur, writing, and pacing (that quiet movie somehow tied my stomach in knots of suspense), The Iron Lady is a good deal more than a TV movie. Of course, this was a British reviewer, and he probably gets his TV movies from the BBC, not Lifetime. Maybe that’s like calling the HBO miniseries “John Adams” a TV movie. Whatever.

The movie is told through flashbacks, memories that loop through the present due to Mrs. Thatcher’s failing memory. She has long been grieving the loss of her husband, and he appears to her as if he is still alive. She is deciding if the time has come to give his belongings away, and each encounter with another person or with her husband’s “ghost” or with one of his belongings sets her mind back to a moment in her history.

Streep is fantastic as the elderly Thatcher. She disappears into the character. She moves between the world of her mind and the world of the present, showing with subtle expressions the emotions that assail her with each change.

There is no judgment of her in the film, if that’s what you are looking for. I know there were protests of this movie in Britain in the working class towns, partly due to Thatcher’s anti-union stance, and perhaps if I were in England I might have stronger opinions on this. But for me this is more like watching The King’s Speech than a movie about George W.; it’s a character study of someone I know little about. And as a character drama, it is well done. I’ll consider it creative non-fiction, not fact. One thing that my friend and I conferred about as the movie got going--we weren't sure if Thatcher was still alive. Neither of us remembered hearing that she'd passed away, but surely they wouldn't portray her as an elderly woman losing her memory if she were still alive? But they did.

So yes, you want to love this woman that you feel you are getting to know, especially when she is the only woman in Parliament. You grieve with her that she and her family pay a price for her success. You love her spirit and determination. But there are a few moments that show how stubborn and prickly she could be. How she might not have given her family all that she could. How nasty she sometimes was in the office and out. (Remind me not to become famous; I hate to think what faults would play out on the screen someday.)

I, personally, loved the scene where the young Thatcher warns her would-be husband that she cannot be like other wives, that her life must mean something, and that she "cannot die washing up teacups."
I can’t say that the faceless protesters made me think more of her and less of them. First of all, the very existence of the Occupy movements make that impossible, as does the footage of protests that I have seen throughout my life. The feeling I got from those scenes was that as she moved further and further from her own daughter-of-a-grocer roots, seeing protesters upfront was more and more of a shock to someone who now lived in the world of words and ideas and fighting over decisions and legislation, rather than physical labor and struggles for money and livelihood. In that way, I don’t think it vilifies her or grants her sainthood.

So that’s my humble opinion. I enjoyed it very much, though it was a little slow. Another movie that demands some patience. I don’t think it’s as well crafted as it could have been. But it gave me a bit of insight into history, and it served to continue my reverence for Meryl Streep’s acting prowess.

Now, while I refuse to "die washing up teacups," I really must do something about this house.

Friday Noon Movie Club: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

A record number of attendees joined me for the Friday Noon Movie Club today—four! Three friends from church and one from our neighborhood. It’s getting downright crowded in the theater. There were more people in general in this showing of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy than I usually see at the Friday noon movies—the crazy holiday season must be behind us now.


After the movie we talked for a few minutes, and later I had a much longer discussion when our church movie group met. Both groups spent the greater part of the discussion just trying to figure out what happened.

This movie demands patience from the viewer. It is long, it is slow, and for the first 20-30 minutes it is impossible to know what is happening. If you watch it on your television, sprawled out on your couch, you will either fall asleep or find something to do while you watch it. And then you will miss half of the story, and you’ll be completely lost.

The story is a twisting, convoluted tale of espionage, populated with people who can’t fully trust anyone and who live under a cloud of suspicion. The 1970s come to life in sets and costumes, and let’s just say that 70s hairstyles really didn’t do much for anyone. There is a grey and grainy atmosphere to the filming, which lends to the cold war feel of the movie. The cities and the time frames blur together; the only way to tell what is a flashback and what is currently happening is to check which glasses George Smiley is wearing. Viewers can’t help but be disoriented, which seems intentional, helping us identify with a cast of characters who stand on constantly shifting ground.

There are some great details in the movie. One of my favorites was the signage. There were signs everywhere, for instance, in the elevator: “Beware of head entrapment.” Or in the reading room, where the sign says “Have you left anything behind?” Also, there are great scenes showing how much paper got pushed around before computers—elevators moving paper, women pushing carts full of paper. And lots of people boxed in by windows or walls or locked trailer-like meeting rooms within rooms.

I also discovered my new favorite celebrity name: Benedict Cumberbatch. Seriously. He plays Smiley’s assistant, Peter; he also plays Sherlock in the BBC show of the same name.

None of my movie pals had read the book (including me). A couple of people had watched the BBC miniseries from the 70s, and they helped explain parts of the story from what they could remember from the miniseries. My husband, Brian, read a few chapters of the book once but couldn’t get into it and gave up. Those who saw the miniseries said that it also started out slow and hard to understand, so apparently that is the M.O. of the story.

Another John le Carré novel that became a movie is The Constant Gardener. That 2005 movie was also a slow burn—not action-packed, but quite beautiful and I loved it. I’m not sure I’d say I love Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It’s got a few scenes that were a bit gritty for my taste, and more importantly, it is just so hard to follow. But the actors are incredible, and by the end I was waiting in suspense to find out who the “mole” was.

See this movie if you enjoy a film you have to unravel or solve; it’s undercover entertainment. If you want a slick action film, go see Mission Impossible.

Friday Noon Movie Club: The Nonstop Adventures of Tintin

Yesterday the Friday Noon Movie Club met for its Christmas week outing: The Adventures of Tintin. That makes it sound like 50-some of us got together for a big party, but in reality, as usual I had the great fortune of having two good friends surprise me, with a total of eight kids among the three of us. We filled up a row, passed around a bag of popcorn, and sat back to enjoy. Before enjoying Tintin, however, we got to enjoy some previews. For some reason, both Hugo and Tintin have included a preview for the reincarnation of Titanic—Titanic in 3D. First of all, why? But more to the point, why at a kids’ movie? Thanks to an old Foxtrot comic book that dealt extensively with Titanic (hilarious, by the way), my kids are already intrigued, but now they’ve pretty much seen all the highlights of the movie, save a few moments that they will not yet be watching. But I digress.


The Adventures of Tintin is two movies. First, it is the movie adaptation of the 1930s comics series, a comic series that continues to be vital in Europe, though lesser known in the US. Many missionary kids I have had contact with knew something about Tintin. Second, it is Steven Spielberg’s revisitation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in animation form. It’s a very exciting movie, and there were some moments that had us all on the edge of our seats. It’s also a movie with lots of guns, even machine guns, with one scene that is a Raiders throwback, but IMHO really has no place in a movie for children—the man outside the door gets shot, the bullets go through the door, and when the door opens, the man falls in. On the other hand, in spite of the violence, Tintin himself doesn’t resort to murder, and most shooting, swashbuckling and combat happen without us taking a close look at it.

Another odd portion of the storyline was devoted to the alcohol addiction of Captain Haddock. That was an interesting twist, because as a child I saw plenty of alcohol on TV and movies—Otis the town drunk on The Andy Griffith Show, omnipresent cocktails on 70s sitcoms, even the sisters’ special “recipe” on The Waltons. It was generally either the norm or comic relief. In Tintin, alcoholism is both comic relief and recognized as a problem that needs to be changed. Not quite sure what my kids took away from that. Probably more informative than my intense curiosity about a “scotch on the rocks” from the Mary Tyler Moore episodes I watched in reruns after school.

There were some portions of the movie that did a particularly good job of bringing the audience along. One scene had Tintin skimming down a cable, zip-line style. And Tintin is a very likeable character—always ready for adventure, always looking for the story like the reporter he is.

Mostly, my girls were captivated by Snowy, Tintin’s loyal dog and sidekick. There was plenty of humor, and we had a good time. It was a little too long and a little too nonstop. One of my fellow attendees said that the Dove foundation rated it good for 12 and up, due to the violence. I can understand that, but I guess I’d think about the kid you want to take. Some are less affected than others and can handle more than others. Allison, 8, seems to have come away unscathed.

Think I might need to check out some Tintin comics from the library. Maybe then I could actually give a book report on my book blog...(really, I AM reading).

Doubleheader: Moneyball and The Descendants

You may wonder why a blog called “Book Club Junkie” continues to talk about movies with very few recent book entries. You may rightly surmise that I haven’t been reading all that much lately. True, very true. Apparently I think this will be changing, because I optimistically checked out about 6 books from the library today. We’ll see. Anyway.


At this week’s Friday Noon Movie Club. I was joined by two friends who had never met each other, and we played what some people call Six Degrees of Separation, others Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and still others Dutch bingo. I call it the Six Degrees of Amy, because I met both of them through my friend Amy. And they each have a popcorn bucket, so I was well supplied. Thanks, ladies!

The movie of the day was Moneyball, and it was great. In theory it is a movie about baseball and the business of building a professional team. Which I, of course, know nothing about. It is also a movie about how a man measures himself, his life, and success.

Brad Pitt is amazing as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s. I read somewhere that he is building a career on movies in which you forget that he is Brad Pitt, a difficult thing for big stars to do. I’d have to say that’s true. Though I know zilch about the real Billy Beane, it seemed to me that Pitt was able to develop a whole physical personality for the character. This year Pitt also starred in The Tree of Life, a much darker role as an abusive father who comes to the knowledge of what he’s been. He was excellent in that as well.

About 10 years ago, Billy Beane began to change the way baseball teams operate by looking at team and player outcomes mathematically rather than by intuition. This did not make his team’s scouting group happy, and it didn’t make him popular with Oakland that year. In the movie, his character struggles with his failures—the scholarship to Stanford that he passed on to play major league baseball only to falter in the sport, a broken marriage that leaves him a part-time parent to his daughter, and managing one of the small-revenue teams in the American League.

Beane knows that the baseball world measures his success only by whether his team wins the last game of the season, and he hasn’t pulled that off. As he seeks change, he reevaluates his relationship to the team and to the game. And he reevaluates how he measures his own success.

Pitt was great, but I also really enjoyed Jonah Hill as the statistics-savvy assistant that Beane hires. Philip Seymour Hoffman was a surprise as the shaved-headed coach of the A’s—I barely recognized him. But he is not used to his full potential here, unfortunately. I would have liked to see more depth to his character.

The last few weeks I’ve sat through quite a few male-oriented movies, including Margin Call and The Ides of March. They all had a strong set of actors turning in great performances, but of these three titles, Moneyball is the movie that I could take something away from, the one I would most readily recommend to others.

About four hours later after I walked out of Moneyball, my church movie group met for a showing of The Descendants. George Clooney is at his best as Hawaiian Matthew King, a husband and father who is forced to face up to a family that has hit rock bottom. He is surrounded by strong performances, particularly Shailene Woodley, who plays his teenage daughter. I cannot imagine family members speaking the way that the daughters in this movie speak to their father and to each other, but beyond that, the complex nature of every family relationship rings true. The whole movie is told from the perspective of King, whose wife is in a coma. Everything King believed about his family has been thrown into question, and he has to work through each piece of information that others hand him. Like King, we are limited to the same information. We get no back story, no flashback scenes with his wife fully alive and well.

There is an interesting tangent to the story. King is the sole trustee of Hawaiian property holdings that have been handed down through generations of his ancestors. The majority of his numerous cousins are pressuring him to sell to one of the interested buyers, as they all stand to profit hugely from the sale of the virgin land. One particularly effective scene shows the family overlooking the oceanfront property, reminiscing about years of camping there. The youngest daughter, 10 years old, looks at them and says “What about me?” That is the basic question of the movie. Through all family and societal difficulties, what do we leave for the next generation?

Toward the end, the movie points to the need for forgiveness and grace in order to move on.

The Descendants is really good, but somehow lacks whatever it takes to be great. Still worth watching—and bring some tissue.

Friday Noon Movie Club: Margin Call

Loss and gain. I gave up two hours, and I got some interesting education in finance plus a good conversation afterward with two lovely friends who joined me. If the three of us start cursing like sailors anytime soon, you can blame the movie.


How many people do you know who actually gained during the heavy losses of the 2008 financial meltdown? Because apparently some people made a whole lot of money in the process, but I don’t know any of them. One of the reasons I don’t know any of them is because they live in the world of investment banking, an area of the economy I do not rightly understand.

Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons play two of the senior decision makers. Each of them comes across as jaded and slightly sinister, though Spacey also has a likeable everyman quality that comes through. Kevin Spacey is excellent, as he usually is. His character is nicely textured. The movie opens with mass firings of his fellow employees, and Sam, Spacey’s character, can only be bothered to think about his dog’s ill health. He can disagree fundamentally with what is happening, and he still has the ability to be the slick leader who smooths over all the rough spots. Good acting all around, including Paul Bettany and Stanley Tucci, with the possible flat note of Demi Moore.

A Forbes article criticized this film for whitewashing the situation, making viewers like the bankers and even putting some blame on the victims. It’s an interesting point of view, but I can’t say watching this made me like them more or blame them less. It did humanize them, which allows me to identify with them, in turn allowing me to examine myself. Villifying them completely would allow me to hold myself apart, seeing them only as the bad guys. Contrary to the old Wall Street words, greed is not good. But it is something most all of us have experience with on both sides—as perpetrator and as victim.

Zachary Quinto plays the young banker who figures out that things could go very badly. In college, he studied rocket science. He’s a symbol of all the brainpower of the 90s and aughts that ended up in the financial sector because that’s where the money was, illustrating one of the flaws of capitalism. He is also the conscience of the movie, a conscience that you can only believe will be squelched in good time.

Spacey’s character instructs the young team to have faith that they have done much good, that their “talents have been used.” This is language we often use when dealing with the long view of religious faith. It seems no coincidence; these are people who have dedicated their lives to money and the pursuit of it, and their god comes in from above (in his helicopter), in the form of Jeremy Irons. While they face payoffs in exchange for stunted careers and broken business and family relationships, he looks into the future and sees more money to be made for himself.

One effective scene shows the scrambling office and ticking clock while we hear the phone conversations of one of the bankers, trying to swing some deals with his customers. You can tell he’s worked these relationships a long time, and you get a sense of the cost to him if he loses those relationships because of unscrupulous selling. One character compares investment banking to gambling; this seems apt as both tend to end with a few big winners and a lot of people who lose everything.

The Forbes article also mentioned that J. C. Chandor, the movie’s writer and director, is the son of a 40-year Merrill Lynch employee. The author felt that the movie was Chandor’s attempt to justify the world he grew up in. If this is the sympathetic view of his father’s work, I’d hate to see what it’d look like if he really wanted his dad’s vocation to look bad.

Friday Noon Movie Club: The Ides of March

Week 3 of the Friday Noon Movie Club. Today we met at The Ides of March. I use the word "we" rather loosely. I sat through the pre-movie commercials alone, then some of the previews. With just a few minutes to go, one of my favorite people walked into the theater and saved me from looking like a lone Ryan Gosling-crazed cougar. For that, I shared my Junior Mints with her.

The first big treat of the afternoon came even before she showed up. I saw a preview for the film version of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Have I mentioned how much I LOVE that book? Tom Hanks stars in flashbacks as the deceased father, and Sandra Bullock downplays her glamour to play the mother. I think everyone in the theater had tears in their eyes just from the trailer. Here's hoping it's as good as it looks to be. And if you see it with me, wear something water resistant--I'll be a complete mess throughout. I promise to bring extra Kleenex.

Then I watched about 25,000 people get murdered in different ways in the next 5 or 6 previews. Lovely.

On to The Ides of March. First of all, let me say the movie lived up to the "pervasive language" warning that warranted the R rating. Wow. And, of course, we find another cast of characters who sleep together before they even can say how they feel about each other.

But the movie is full of actors I love: Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, George Clooney, and yes, Ryan Gosling. Plus another quick turn by Jennifer Ehle (Elizabeth from the A & E version of Pride and Prejudice), who seems to be turning up in everything these days. I'm thinking she must have had a baby and taken time off, and now she's back.

These actors are well cast, and Gosling is great as young, extremely competent and confident second-in-command of the campaign that is attempting to get Clooney's character the Democratic nomination. Hoffman is running the campaign, and Giamatti is running the opposing campaign. They are both strong and sinister. Almost all the characters have dark motives and schemes worthy of the Shakespearian-tinged title. Gosling's character is an exception; he totally believes in his candidate and wants to help change the world.

Clooney is his usual smooth self, which means he makes a convincing politician. He says a lot of the things I expect Clooney would like to hear a candidate say. But he starts off by saying he is not a Christian, an atheist, a Muslim, or a Jew. He believes in a piece of paper, the Constitution. But of course the Constitution is not a religious document to be "believed in"; it does not provide a moral basis. And this presidential hopeful does not appear to have a moral basis, nor do any of the others in the game. People are collateral damage in the pursuit of getting elected so you can make the country a better place.

In the end, this is a tragedy. There is a serious lack of redemption; The moment where characters should be reaching epiphany passes them by, and they are left hardened and scarred. This is a chess game where all anyone cares about is scoring the checkmate. And you feel sorry for the characters who can only move certain directions on the board, options narrowing as the game develops.

It's a cynical look at politics, which probably doesn't really shock many of us at this point in the current state of the US government. 

I got back in the car and turned on the radio. A group called Luminate was on, singing "You make me innocent." It hit me again how grateful I am that, no matter my plans and schemes, God makes me innocent, which is what you need to feel after watching something like this.

That's all for now. If you show up next week, I might share my Junior Mints with you, too. If Brian doesn't cut off my allowance after he finds out I bought candy at the movie.

Diagnosis: A Little Cold

Today was the inaugural Friday Noon Movie Club event. You hadn't heard? Well. For the immediate future, I plan to attend a movie every Friday afternoon, around noon, in an attempt to keep up with what's in the theater for vocational purposes. Anyone available and interested can let me know, and I'll put you on the email list. Each week I will send an email on Wed or Thur giving the time, location and title of the movie I'll be attending that week, and I'd be happy to have joiners! Today there were four of us, and we are all a little more icked out by germs than before. Icked out being a technical term, of course.

We went to see Contagion. Originally we intended to see Margin Call, but after they posted the movie times, they changed them again, and there was no early showing of that one. The theater assures me that this is a very rare occurence. So we switched to Contagion. It is about, you guessed it, contagion. A more deadly H1N1-style virus is multiplying rapidly, taking lives around the globe. This movie hypothesizes what that would look like, what politics would emerge between the CDC, Homeland Security, different coutnries, drug companies and the media.

There are things to appreciate about this movie, namely the cast. It includes, but is not remotely limited to, Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, and two of my dark horse favorites, Jennifer Ehle John Hawkes. A lot of good performances by great actors. Not a lot of great performances.

The storyline mostly seemed believable, but somehow, in portraying a pandemic, it lacked drama. We didn't really get to see inside the heads of the people trying to get it under control, so it was hard to care too much. I wonder if director Steven Soderbergh was trying to avoid sentimental manipulation and went too far the other way instead. There was one scene that you will want to be warned about, which gave us an uber-CSI autopsy moment that I, personally, could have happily lived the rest of my life without seeing.

An interesting thread at the beginning was a shout-out to journalists--the ill health of print media means it is hard to pay for journalists to look deeper into what government agencies are doing, leaving the public in the hands of conspiracy theorists, charlatans and, worst of all, bloggers.

Mitch (Matt Damon) and his daughter are the only characters I really cared about at all, with the possible exception of Dr. Mears (Kate Winslet). Mitch's wife, Beth, is the first victim, and in an almost judgment-by-plague kind of way, she is coming down with it as she speaks on the phone to the man with whom she is having an affair.

There were also a couple of things that got in the way of taking the movie seriously. Some scenes with the killer combo of bad dialogue and acting, hazmat suits that made the wearers look almost exactly like Oompa-Loompas from Willy Wonka, and a Homeland Security official played by Bryan Cranston. He played the dad in "Malcolm in the Middle," and no matter how hard I try to take him seriously, I just want to laugh when I watch him.


Soderbergh also directed the film Traffic, which told the story of drugs, from growers to dealers to politicians to law enforcement to users of all kinds. This is like a spinoff of Law and Order; call it Traffic: Flu Unit. The movie tries to follow the trail, but there are too many characters to care about. If we had enough face time with each of them, we would be sitting there for 3 hours, and, truly, 106 minutes was enough.

But you'll never look at doorknobs, or the poles you hold onto in subways, or even people who cough in the same way again.

Next week's Friday Noon Movie Club will not be meeting in the cheap seats. I intend to take my kids to see Hugo, the movie adaptation of The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Everything I've seen about it points to a wonderful film (possibly a bit scary for the youngest viewers). It was shot in 3D, and it's getting rave reviews for that aspect of it, so I might even fork over the big bucks. We are generally a 2D family. But what the heck, it's a holiday weekend. So let me know if you are interested, either for this coming week or for the short-term future, in receiving notice of when and where the movies will be. I'll attempt to pick movies I really want to see, but it will have to fit the time frame, and I'll choose the cheap theater most of the time. Maybe I'll see you there!