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.

The Neland Women's Book Club Takes on "Okay for Now"

Neland represented today with a big group, as was to be expected since we were discussing our own Gary Schmidt’s young adult novel, Okay for Now. While I blogged about my reading of this book back in March, hearing the insights of other people always gives me a new appreciation. I scattered chairs around the living room, and people were kind enough to peer at each other around the Christmas tree without mentioning the obvious obstacle it presented!


Our leader tonight was Lisa, who had never even been to book club before, but somehow she ended up leading. Boy are we glad she did!

We were full of praise for this book, not just because every last one of us a secret fan crush on Gary, but because it’s really good. Really good. He ties together the broken state of our lives and the wholeness that we hope for, throwing in love, mercy and forgiveness, plus a good sense of humor, for good measure. What more could you want?

The abusive father was so terrible. We want the mother to step up and do something, stand up and protect. Why did she stay and allow her children to be subjected to this? Also, how could a principal be so awful? We had questions. In the end, though, those are the same questions that we wonder every day when we watch the news. How could a wife stand by a man who has been abusing children? How could a teacher have an affair with a student? How could children bully each other online to the point of one committing suicide? It goes on. That’s the broken nature of the world.

And Doug Swieteck’s world is broken. His father is abusive, his brother is in Vietnam, his other brother is getting into trouble, and Doug himself is newly stranded in a new town that he hates, a hatred augmented by his attitude and a learning deficiency. Vietnam plays such a crucial part of both the times (late 1960s) and the story. It’s a symbol of the broken nation that we live in, of broken humanity, and broken bodies. Things are not going well.

Okay for Now brings a bit of wholeness back to the world, just as Doug is attempting to make whole both his life and an Audubon book that is being taken apart. Using Jane Eyre and the art of John James Audubon to broaden Doug’s life, Schmidt illustrates the need we all have for a hope and a future. He discusses art and composition knowledgably and brings in a multitude of various characters in the small town who help Doug take steps toward wholeness.

One memorable moment in the book is when Doug’s brother is finally called by name. His name is Christopher, and our friend Karen brought up the fact that St. Christopher is remembered for his strength in carrying people across a raging river. You’ll have to read the book to see how this fits with the Christopher in the novel.

We always spend a portion of our time talking about the things we didn’t like about the book. We couldn’t skip that just because we know the author, right? So we tried to get critical. Yes, a lot of things happen very quickly to this young man. And yes, there are a few coincidences that, if we think too hard about them, seem contrived. But the overall effect is that of redemption and forgiveness, beauty and hope, in the face of great difficulty.

And Lisa read from the review that Richard Peck (yes, that Richard Peck) published in the New York Times. In the midst of a gushing review, he said this: “’Okay for Now’ is crowded with more incident and empowerment than any eighth-grade year or novel can quite contain. Events stretch credulity. At one point, Doug turns up briefly on the Broadway stage, playing a female role, no less. But Schmidt is a master of the unlikely.” If Richard Peck can overlook a few things, who are we to say otherwise?! Not to mention the book was a finalist for the National Book Award, and looks to be a favorite for the Newbery.

How dark should a novel for middle school and early high school students be? This novel has some very dark moments, but we also felt like some of the things that might “stretch credulity” make it more accessible and more appropriate for the target audience. And the end result a novel full of hope and restoration, even though things are not all neatly wrapped up. I just finished reading this book aloud to my 12-year-old, and I felt like the novel went about as far to the dark side as she could handle, and yet it left her happy and hopeful. It also mirrored the emotional ups and downs of this period of her life.

Okay for Now is simply a wonderful book, and we wholeheartedly recommend it.

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.