Feb 3
The courtroom drama is often one of the easiest ways to showcase a morality play. The arguments can be posed by the attorneys and a jury can represent the conscious of the audience, siding with “right” when needed or providing a dose of controversy when that’s required. Many difficult issues have been explored in Hollywood films by using the courtroom as a construct. Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia is one of the best.
It’s time to get back into the swing of things with 2011 in the bag and a blossoming 2012 underway, so I decided to start with Nowhere to Run. Yep, the Jean-Claude Van Damme flick. I remember first seeing this maybe a year or two after it dropped on VHS. It was promoted as Van Damme’s big “acting” movie, with less martial arts and more resolute squints.
I’ve never really taken much of an interest in aliens or alien abduction stories. I get that there are countless narratives of aliens reaching down over some far-fling section of the American countryside to grab some unassuming redneck, but the stories have never interested me much. Fire in the Sky, the 1993 film, is based on one such account: the alleged abduction of Travis Walton.
Bill Murray puts in one of his best performances in Groundhog Day. This 1993 comedy from director Harold Ramis is a classic comedy that really does work better with many repeat viewings. Reliving this gem is a pleasure. Murray’s melancholy is the perfect fit for his weatherman character, an arrogant tool forced to relive the same day over and over again until some sort of cosmic “rightness” takes hold.
Aug 20
Based on the novel of the same name by Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club is a powerful and emotional film. Presented as a series of connected vignettes, Wayne Wang’s adaptation of Tan’s novel takes us through generations of a Chinese family as their lives unfold in memories and in the present tense. The movie, produced by Oliver Stone, explores the consequences of the past in contrast with the events and choices of the present with respect to a group of Chinese immigrant women.
In many ways, The Joy Luck Club is the ultimate story about the connection between mothers and daughters and between families. Tan’s novel and Wang’s motion picture detail how the past impacts the present and how children who think they are so very different from their parents are, in fact, often the same. Wang’s movie explores these connections with emotional sensitivity and appropriate cinematic flourish.
