Daniel Garber talks with writer and lawyer Jay Paul Deratany about Foster Boy at the Toronto Black Film Festival
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Jamal is an angry 19-year-old who finds himself back in a Chicago courtroom once again. He’s a product of the deeply- flawed foster care industry, a privatized system which left him physically and mentally scarred, and in and out of prison. But this time he’s before a judge voluntarily; he’s suing the corporation that put him through hell. His lawyer? An unsympathetic corporate shill assigned to his case, pro bono, by a sympathetic judge. Jamal sees a “three-piece” supporter of the system he’s fighting, and the lawyer sees Jamal as a “thug” he’s ordered to represent. Can the two of them fight the power of an abusive system that made him a foster boy?
Foster Boy is the name a new courtroom drama and legal thriller inspired by true events, that was the opening night feature at the Toronto Black Film Festival. It’s produced by Shaquille O’Neal directed by Youssef Delara and stars Shane Paul McGhie, Matthew Modine, and Louis Gosset, Jr.
The script is by Jay Paul Deratany, a screenwriter who is also an accomplished Chicago lawyer and a foster youth advocate.
I spoke with Jay Paul Deratany in Chicago, via ZOOM, on February 17, 2021.
Foster Boy is available across North America at the Toronto Black Film Festival through Sunday, and online VOD.
Dissidents. Films reviewed: The Dissident, The Chicago 10
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for cultural mining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
I’m recording this on Wednesday (January 6th), when the Q Anon army, red-pilled and red-capped, at the behest of a certain, soon-to-be-former President, has just stormed the (widely anticipated but strangely unguarded) Capitol building and many state government buildings, too. Sort of a reverse-coup, an attempt to block regime change? The mob has dispersed and Trump has temporarily been stripped of his Twitter account, a fate worse than impeachment. But if you’re listening to this on Friday morning, things may have changed so much that these comments are already old hat.
Either way, I think it’s as good a time as any to talk about political unrest and dissent. So this week I have two new movies, both documentaries. There are antiwar radicals who disrupt the Democrats in Chicago; and a Saudi journalist who disappears in Istanbul.
The Dissident
Dir: Bryan Fogel
Jamal Khashoggi is a successful journalist born into an illustrious family in Medina, Saudi Arabia. For thirty years he works tirelessly for the government, and is part of the country’s elite. But in a sudden about face, he divorces his wife, and leaving his family behind, relocates in Washington DC. He is hired by The Washington Post to write columns, some of which criticize the Saudi government and its royal family. But in the authoritarian monarchy this is a no-no. He becomes a dissident.
Later, he falls in love with a young Turkish woman — a scholar who speaks Arabic — he met at a conference. He travels to Turkey to meet his fiancee’s family. In order to marry, they need a document from the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, proving he has divorced his first wife. But this is where things get weird; after entering the consulate a year ago, he is never seen again.
After widespread outrage, Turkish detectives are allowed into the building. Based on the evidence they find — in addition to wiretaps, recordings and external video footage — they came to a shocking conclusion: Khashoggi was murdered in cold blood by a hit team of Saudi team of special ops flown in especially for that purpose. He was suffocated in front of a diplomat=, his body dismembered by a pathologist and burned to ashes in a barbecue pit
The Dissident is a detailed documentary — in Arabic, Turkish and English — that traces Khashoggi’s life and death from inisder to dissident to victim. Using new interviews with most of the key players — though no one inside the Kingdom — it solves many of the mysteries dogging his case. It rarely veers from its central topic, Khashoggi and freedom of speech, and stays away from important issues like women’s rights, the war in Yemen, never mind cultural expression and sexual liberation. But the one area the doc does explore is an insider’s look at dissidents across the Arab world. The film is narrated by Omar Abdulaziz, a young Saudi who sought asylum in Canada. He helped guide Khashoggi when he becomes a dissident. And this is where the movie gets really interesting. It explores a government-sponsored troll army that silences dissent on social networks like Twitter — a site used by 80% of Saudis; and the work Omar has done to counter it. While some of the doc is a bit dry, it shines when it digs deep into cyber warfare, political activism and and newly revealed secrets of the Kingdom.
The Chicago 10 (2007)
Wri/Dir: Brett Morgen
It’s the summer of ’68, and the youth of America, the product of the baby boom, is revolting. LBJ has plunged the country into war in Vietnam; civil rights leaders, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy have been assassinated. People are sitting in, dropping out, fighting back. It’s also an election year, and the DNC (Democratic National Committee) is holding its convention in Chicago. To confront this and to have their voices heard, radical political action youth groups converge on Chicago from across the country. The Yippies, from the east coast, headed by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and poet Allen Ginsberg, are humorous, media savvy, sex-positive masters of performance art.
Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden fight against war, poverty and racism. David Dellinger is a long-time anti-war activists. They plan a massive be-in, a festival of life, based in Lincoln Park, full of speeches and music culminating in a march to the Hilton Hotel to confront the Democratic convention. But they are met by riot police, ordered by Mayor Daley, and the national guard who violently attack the largely unarmed peace activists. Loads of people were arrested and injured, and a key few — including Davis, Hoffman, Rubin, Heyden, and Dellinger — are put on trial in 1969 by the feds and charged with conspiracy. For some reason they throw Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party into the group, when he was only in Chicago for a few hours that summer. And thus begins the lengthy show trial.
The Chicago 10 is an excellently researched documentary on that famous trial and the demonstrations that led to it. The film jumps back and forth, chronologically, between the trial and the summer demos. No cameras were allowed into the courtroom, so the trial scenes are 3-D animated using the actual transcripts, and the voices of actors like Nick Nolte, Leiv Schrieber, Hank Azaria, Roy scheider, Mark Ruffalo,Jeffrey Wright and many others. The voices are occasionally cartoonish, because, well, its a
cartoon, but generakky feel like the r eal thing. The demonstations are taken from beautifully restored contemporary footage and news clips, as well as radio recordings, and onstage performamces all done while the trial was actually taking place. (none of the accused were locked away during the trial so they were constantly on the media.
It’s full of revelations. Allen Ginsberg is called in as a witness, and the prosecutor makes him recite his most salacious erotic poems, presumably to shock the jury. There are great news stories, like little kids in Chicago seen playing cops and protesters, instead of cops and robbers, where in this game activists get clubbed by police.
You may have seen the much lauded the Trial of the Chicago 7, Aaron Sorkin’s star-studded take on the story. While the production values and acting are great in that one, Chicago 10 is much more historically accurate than Sorkin’s revisionist drama.
If the topic interests you, Chicago 10 is definitely worth a watch.
The Chicago 10 is now available online, and The Dissident opens today across North America, check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 fm and on my website culturalmining.com.
Against the Grain. Films reviewed: Judy vs Capitalism, Monkey Beach, The Trial of the Chicago 7
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Toronto’s Fall Film Festival Season continues with ImagineNative Film + Media Arts Festival, the world’s largets indigenous film festival, and Rendezvous with Madness, the first and largest arts and mental health festival in the world, both running through Sunday, the 25th.
This week I’m talking about three new movies – a doc, a drama and a courtroom pic – about people who go against the grain. There’s a young woman resisting ghosts, another woman fighting anti-abortion activists; and boomers protesting the war in Vietnam.
Dir: Mike Holboom
Judy Rebick is a well-known activist and writer in Toronto. As a former Trotskyite revolutionary turned writer and TV commentator, she’s a pro-choice feminist and socialist known for slogans like “Radical is Practical”. She can be seen everywhere, from CBC panels to tent-city protests. A new documentary looking at her life divides it into six stages: Family – her dad was a baseball player quick to pick fights; Weight – she says she has a pair of hips “like two battleships”; Feminism – women’s bodies and the violence they face; Abortion – her hands-on role in legalizing reproductive rights in Canada; Others – her struggles with depression and mental health; and End Notes – her views on various political topics, like the rise of neo-liberalism, the war in Gaza, and as head of NAC, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.
Did you know she single-handedly fought off a man trying to stab Dr Henry Morgantaler with a pair of garden shears? This film includes footage of that in slow motion. Each section begins with a speech – some mundane talks in lecture halls, others shouted through a bullhorn at a rally. Judy vs Capitalism is directed by artist/filmmaker Mike Holboom in his patented style: clear sound and straightforward narration, combined with avant-garde images: slow motion, high speed, underwater photography, blurred and melting visuals, random faces… basically Holboom’s interpretations of Rebick’s moods, memories, thoughts and ideas rather than the typical clips you might expect in a conventional biography. Judy vs Capitalism is an experimental look at a Canadian icon.
Dir: Loretta Todd (Based on the novel by Eden Robinson)
Lisa (Grace Dove) is a young woman who lives in East Vancouver. She’s been there for the past two years with nothing to show for it but a bad hangover. Till her friend Tab tells her it’s time to go home, back to her family in the Haisla community in Kitimat. So she does. Her family is shocked but delighted to to see her – they weren’t even sure she was still alive. There’s her mom and dad, her little brother Jimmy (Joel Oulette) a swimming champ, and her Uncle Mick (Adam Beach) who told her at an early age to say “f*ck the oppressors!” Then there’s her grandma Ma-Ma-Oo (Tina Lameman) who taught Lisa everything she knows… including things she doesn’t want to know. Like why a little man with red hair keeps appearing. A crow talks to her, and ghosts (people who should be dead) appear to her in real, human form. (Tab, for example, was murdered but she’s still around.) Worst of all are the dreams and premonitions she keeps having – that her brother Jimmy, the swimmer – is going to drown. Are her powers a gift or a curse? Can she ever live normally? And can she keep Jimmy out of the water?
Monkey Beach is a good YA drama filmed in the gorgeous forests and waters of Kitimat in the pacific northwest, with a uniformly good indigenous cast. It incorporates traditional Haisla culture and practices with contemporary, realistic social problems, sprinkled with the supernatural. And it flashes back and forth between the present day and Lisa’s childhood. I like this movie but I can’t help but compare it to the CBC TV series Trickster, which is edgier, faster-moving and more complex. They’re both based on Eden Robinson’s novels – Monkey Beach was her first, showing many of the themes later explored in Son of a Trickster. That said, if you’re a fan of Trickster, you’ll want to see Monkey Beach, too.
Wri/Dir: Aaron Sorkin
It’s the summer of ‘68 in the USA, and the youth are restless. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King had just been killed, with demonstrations springing up across the country. The US is embroiled in an increasingly senseless war in Vietnam and it’s an election year. So droves of young people converge on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, to have their voices heard. The protests are brutally crushed by police and state troopers. Nixon is elected in November, and the protest leaders, known as the Chicago 7, are arrested and put on trial. The defendants are from the SDS – Students for a Democratic Society, a radical group that sprung out of the labour movement – led by Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp); the Yippies, founded by Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin who use performance and pranks to forward their agenda; anti-war activist David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch); and Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) co-founder of the Black Panther Party, known both for its militant image and progressive social programs. The charge? Conspiracy, even though these group leaders had never met one other.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 is two-hour film that manages to condense hundreds of days of testimony into a few key scenes. This includes a shocking re-enactment of the binding and gagging of Bobby Seale in the courtroom. The script’s pace is fast, the production values excellent, and the acting is superb, especially Baron-Cohen in an unusual funny-serious role, Mark Rylance as their lawyer, William Kunstler, Frank Langella as the unjust judge Julius Hoffman, and Lynch as the veteran pacifist. Women are invisible in this film, except as receptionists, wives-of and one undercover FBI agent. I was glued to the screen the entire time. Still, it leaves me with an uneasy feeling Aaron Sorkin has done some subtle, historic slight of hand. He portrays the anti-war movement as mainly about honouring and saving the lives of American soldiers, not Vietnamese civilians. It buries the aims of the defendants beneath petty squabbles. And somehow he takes a protest aimed squarely at Democratic politicians — the hawks and conservative Democrats in a city and state run by that party — into a Democrats vs Republican division…!
Hmm…
Judy vs Capitalism is at Rendezvous with Madness; Monkey Beach is at ImagineNative, both through Sunday; and The Trial of the Chicago 7 is now streaming on Netflix.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.
Daniel Garber talks with immigration attorney Judy Wood about the new biopic Saint Judy
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
It’s the early 2000s in L.A. Judy Wood (Michelle Monaghan), an immigration lawyer and single mom, discovers a shocking case. A young woman – a school teacher who defied Taliban oppression in Afghanistan – is incarcerated in California awaiting deportation. But sending her back to her home village would be like a death sentence. Why isn’t she considered a refugee? Trouble is women are not a minority group, and her religion, language and nationality – Muslim and Pashtun – are the same as her oppressors. Which means she’s not a “persecuted minority” and doesn’t qualify for asylum. What can she do?
Saint Judy is a new biopic based on real events that tells the story of this important trial. It centres on Judy Wood, an immigration lawyer – still practising in LA – who changed the Law of Asylum.
I spoke to Judy in Los Angeles via telephone from CIUT 89.5 FM in Toronto.
Saint Judy has its Canadian Premier on Thursday, June 20 in Oakville, and its Toronto VOD launch on Friday, June 21 at the Revue Cinema in a benefit for Sistering. Judy Wood will appear in panel discussionsat both screenings.
Past, present, future. Films reviewed: Aniara, Peterloo PLUS Prism Prize videos
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
100 years ago this week in 1919, the Winnipeg General Strike brought that city to a standstill. But did you know there was another important political demonstration 100 years earlier in Manchester in 1819? So this week I’m looking at movies set in the past, the present and the future. There’s an historical epic set in Northern England, a Swedish cruise set in post-nuclear outer space, and some state-of-the-art Canadian music videos set in the right here, right now.
Wri/Dir: Pella Kågerman, Hugo Lilja
It’s the near future. Mimaroben (Emelie Jonsson) is a happy and hopeful flower child who works onboard a cruise ship. The Aniara has champagne bars, shopping malls, discos and restaurants to suit every taste on the 23-day cruise. Passengers are reassured by the stern pilot Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro) the conservative captain Chefone (Arvin Kananian) and veteran Astronomer (Anneli Martini). Mimaroben has a special job. She works with Mima, an A.I. program where homesick passengers re-experience the natural beauty they
left behind. But this is no ordinary cruise ship. They’re leaving an uninhabitable planet Earth for a new home on Mars.
The problem is when we humans are busy ruining the planet we’re also polluting the solar system with space trash. A spare piece of metal hits Aniara sending the spaceship off-course. Can the crew reassure the passengers that everything is OK? Will Mimarobe find love aboard a space ship? Will they ever reach Mars? Or will they forge a new life on the space ship itself?
Aniara is a dark (though sometimes warm and funny) look at a possible future when we’re all pulled out of a numbing consumerist existence and forced to face reality. There are nihilists who have wild sex orgies, law and order types who want people imprisoned, and cultists who form new religions and rituals. The story is based on a Swedish poem written in the 1950s when people were most afraid of nuclear holocaust, but it works just as well in a world facing climate change and ecological disaster.
Aniara is a terrific distopian look at our future — and would make a great double feature with Claire Denis’ High Life.
…is an annual Canadian award for that underrated cinematic form, the music videos. This year’s winner is Low by Belle Game. It’s directed by Kevan Funk (Hello Destroyer) and is an exquisitely disturbing short film made in an LA factory producing life-like rubber sex toys and robots. It shows the bodies being assembled, part by part, as the music plays in the background. You have to see it to believe it.
Prizes also went to Soleil Denault, Clairmont the Second and Lacey Duke. And the audience award went to Said the Whales’ “Unamerican” for an unusual photographic stop-motion video by Johnny Jansen.
Dir: Mike Leigh
It’s 1819 in Lancashire in northern England and things are not going well. Soldiers with PTSD are returning home, broke, after the Napoleonic Wars. Local weavers find their wages cut in half by greedy industrialists. And the new Corn Laws, which protect rich farmers from foreign competition, means the price of a loaf of bread is going through the roof. Ordinary people working twice as hard can’t feed their families. Politicians ignore ordinary people, and the magistrates are even worse, flogging an old women for drunkenness, and even hanging a man for taking a coat to keep warm.
Something has got to give. Luckilly it’s also a time of great change. Orators like the middle-class Henry Hunt (Rory Kinnear) are speaking out: put the common people into the House of Commons! Preachers, rabble rousers, journalists, organizers and advocates – both men and woman – are pulling people together for a mass rally scheduled for August.
They face opponents, though. An effete Prince Regent adorned in white plumes fears a French style revolution. Factory owners want absolute control over their workers. Local magistrates hate and distrust ordinary people. Spies, thugs, and agents provocateurs are hired to make trouble among the protesters. And the military, who normally fight on foreign soil, are called in to quell the masses. What will happen on the day of the rally?
It’s not a spoiler to say that the title of this movie, Peterloo, refers to the massacre of hundreds of unarmed men, women and children in Manchester’s St Peter’s Field by military and local police on horseback. But most of this terrific historical drama looks at the period leading up to the demo and the subsequent government attack on its own people.
It’s an ensemble picture with many dozens of characters, each with their own memorable stories, portrayed over the course of the film. Fantastic music, settings, costumes, and acting, in many ways it’s like a great Hollywood epic from the 1960s, with a “cast of thousands” moving en masse across a wide screen. But it also shows the poignant individual stories of the odd characters you meet along the way. It is long (and somewhat confusing) but always interesting and politically relevant.
Peterloo is another memorable movie from the great UK director Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies, Mr Turner). I liked it a lot.
Aniara and Peterloo both open today in Toronto at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Check your local listings. And you can watch the top ten Prism Prize music videos at prismprize.com.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
War and remembrance. Films reviewed: Hacksaw Ridge, Birth of a Nation, Seoul Station
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
November 11th is Remembrance Day, when we remember the death and destruction of war. Even wars fought for good reasons may result in horrible deaths for soldiers and ordinary people. This week I’m looking at movies about war. There are armies of zombies in Seoul who want to eat people, a secret slave army in Virginia that wants to free people, and a man who joins the US army in WWII… but refuses to kill people.
Hacksaw Ridge
Dir: Mel Gibson
It’s the 1930s. Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield) is a young man who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with his drunk Dad (Hugo Weaving) and religious Mom (Rachel Griffiths). As a kid he loved climbing cliffs and rassling with his brother Hal. But when he saw how close to death his brother came when he hit him in the head with a brick, he swore never to hurt or kill another person again. As a Seventh Day Adventist he takes the Sixth Commandment — thou shalt not kill – very seriously. Years later, he rescues a man injured in an accident by putting a tourniquet on his leg. He has studied medicine on his own since he can’t go to college. At the hospital he meets the beautiful and smart Dorothy (Teresa Palmer) a nurse. It’s love at first sight.
But it’s 1941 and the country is at war. Young men all rush to join the army and Doss is no exception. But he joins as a medic to save lives, not as a fighter to kill people. He and Dorothy plan to get married after boot camp. But then reality hits. You can’t be in the army and refuse to carry a gun. They offer him a Section 8 – a psychiatric discharge. But he refuses to quit. He’s not crazy, he’s not un-American, he’s not unpatriotic. The army disagrees. Soldiers beat him and bully him, and on his wedding day the Army throws him in the brig, leaving Dorothy waiting at the altar. Will he be court-martialed?
Somehow he makes it to Okinawa, in time for a crucial battle. They must climb Hacksaw Ridge, a sheer cliff, to face a never-ending battalion of Japanese soldiers. Can Doss use his medic skills to save his fellow soldiers?
Hacksaw Ridge is a heartfelt war movie about a conscientious objector who goes into battle without a gun. For a movie about a heroic man opposed to killing, there’s also an ungodly amount of gory carnage shown in minute detail. Not for the squeamish.
Interestingly, the entire cast, except for Andrew Garfield and Vince Vaughan, is Australian. And with all those thin-lipped, lantern-jawed, soldiers, I had a hard time telling them apart. (Didn’t that guy just die in a foxhole? Must have been someone else…). Garfield, though, stands out as the stubborn, jug-eared Doss. If you like heroic war movies, this one pushes all the right buttons.
Birth of a Nation
Dir: Nate Parker
Nat Turner (Nate Parker) is born to loving parents and grandparents in a wooden house in Virginia in the early 19th century. At an early age mystics declare him a born leader, with special birthmarks on his belly. He grows up a student of the bible, reading to himself at night. And he happily marries a beautiful woman when they fall in love.,But he is also an African American in the south which means… he is also a slave. The slave owner Sam Turner (Armie Hammer) played with him as a child and they share the same last name. When earnings are down Sam hires him out to other plantations to preach to fellow slaves, to help calm potential unrest. Nat delivers the sermons, while Sam keeps the cash.
It is on these visits that Nat Turner witnesses the truly horrifying nature of slavery. A young girl kept like a dog with collar and leash. Men set upon by vicious dogs. Families broken up and sold like cattle at auctions. Heinous torture – worse than you can imagine – for crimes as simple as looking a white man directly in the eyes. Women are subject to horrific rape. Murder and lynching — always white violence against blacks — is not even considered a crime. So Nat Turner decides enough is enough and organizes a small army to fight back. But can a handful of men and woman overturn slavery itself?
Birth of a Nation is a fictionalized retelling of the famous Nat Turner rebellion. The movie concentrates more on Nat’s life in the years leading up to it than on the battle itself. The film is disturbing, dealing with topics rarely shown in mainstream movies. Even so, it has a mainstream feel to it: flickering candles, gushing music, and Hollywood kisses in profile. The title itself reclaims D.W. Griffith’s wildly popular silent movie from 1915 which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and inspired countless terrorist attacks on black Americans. This is a good film about a neglected part of US history, downplayed or glossed over in most movies.
Seoul Station
Dir: Sang-ho Yeon
It’s a typical day at the central train station in Seoul, Korea. It’s used by commuters everyday. But it’s also a mecca for the disenfranchised — the poor, the mentally ill and the homeless. Hye-sun is a young runaway, a former sex worker who lives with her wimpish boyfriend. They are separated by a massive zombie attack — and the virus is spreading. He teams up with her father, while she follows a deranged, homeless man. Hye-sun communicates with her boyfriend whenever they can find a signal on their phones. When she turns to the police for help, they lock her up in a jail cel. Later, a large group of people trapped in an area besieged by zombies appeals to the army. But instead of rescuing them, the soldiers fire water canons and teargas… not at the zombies, but at their fellow citizens. Who will survive the zombie onslaught?
Seoul Station is an animated prequel to the hit horror film Train to Busan. Characters are drawn with clean black outlines against realistic backgrounds. Seoul is portrayed as a desolate place, its dim skies lit only by neon crosses. This may be a zombie movie but it’s also an unsparing look at the maltreatment of the homeless and disenfranchised in modern Korea.
Birth of a Nation is now playing and Hacksaw Ridge opens today in Toronto; check your local listings. Seoul Station is playing at the upcoming ReelAsian Film Festival. Go to reelasian.com for showtimes. This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Old-school Heroes. Films Reviewed: Gleason, Anthropoid PLUS #TIFF16
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
The Toronto International Film Festival, opening in September, has announced some of its big ticket premiers. And a running theme is heroism. TIFF opens with Antoine Fuqua’s (Training Day) remake of the classic spaghetti western The Magnificent Seven (based, of course, on Kurusawa’s Seven Samurai). Another movie filled with heroes is Oliver Stone’s biopic Snowden. It’s about everyone’s favourite whistleblower
Edward Snowden who revealed the chilling fact that the NSA is spying on all of us.
India’s great director Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding) is bringing us Queen of Katwe about a young girl in Uganda who is sent to Russia to become a chess champion. This one looks so good, and co-stars Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo. And then there’s a political documentary about IF Stone’s investigative journalism. The theme is in the title: All Governments Lie. I haven’t seen any of these movies yet, but they do sound interesting.
But there’s no need to wait a month for your share of heroes. This week I’m looking at two new movies with old fashioned heroes. There’s a wartime thriller about two men fighting for their country, and a documentary about an NFL running back fighting for his life.
Gleason
Dir: Clay Tweel
Steve Gleason is a running back. Smaller than the average football player, he makes up for it with his lightning speed. He plays for the New Orleans Saints. Just a year after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, he sets the crowd wild with a legendary play at the Superdome. It’s labelled a symbol of the city’s rebirth. Steve is the antithesis of the stereotypical football player: long-haired, adventurous, smart and articulate. He’s like a punk hippy. He’s a great guy, a free spirit, a local hero. He meets Michel – a wonderful woman, equally unusual and independent. They get married enjoying the fun and laughter of young love.
He retires from football and just a couple years later, he notices a physical change. It’s just a small change, but he goes to a naturopath and then to a doctor to check it out. And in January, 2011, he is diagnosed with a neurological condition: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. ALS, also known as Lou Gerhig’s disease, is a degenerative condition where you gradually lose your ability to walk, talk, move and eventually even to breathe – your awareness and perception of the outside world doesn’t change, but your ability to move and express yourself does. And just a few weeks after his diagnosis Michel discovers she’s pregnant.
This film is a record of his life with ALS. It shows the very rapid decline in his abilities over the course of just a year. But during that time he and Michel decide to devote their lives to raising awareness of ALS. He makes appearances at football games, and becomes friends with musician Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam. And he raises lots of money so that all people with ALS are provided with devoices to give them a voice after they stop talking. This film is also a video letter to their son Rivers so he won’t grow up never hearing his Dad’s voice.
This is a touching personal movie about faith, disabilities and family relations. It chronicles the day-to-day difficulty and drudgery of living with ALS, including lots of scenes you may not want to think about: like surgery, bowel movements, food chewing and marital difficulties. There’s also Michel caring for two people at once – her husband and her baby. And his Dad, an evangelical Christian who believes in faith healing. Steve’s faith is very different.
While not an easy film, I think it raises awareness of ALS a lot more than dumping buckets of ice water on your head.
Anthropoid
Dir: Sean Ellis
It’s WWII in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Jan and Josef (Cillian Murphy, James Dornan) are two members of the resistance. They are based in London with the government in exile, but are parachuted back into their country late at night. Along with a handful of others, they are there on a mission known as Operation Anthropoid. Their goal? To assassinate SS General Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich is considered the third most powerful man in Nazi Germany, after Hitler and Himmler, and is in charge of the SS in occupied Czechoslavakia. Because of his infamous cruelty and mass killings, he is known as the Butcher of Prague.
The two men make their way into the city to carry out their assignment. But when they meet up with what remains of the local resistance fighters, they discover broken men. They have completely lost their moxie. They don’t want to fight;
their only goal is to stay alive. They warn Jan and Josef that their mission is impossible and will lead to torture and death.
They meet two young women to pose as girlfriends so as ot to raise suspicion. Marie (Charlotte Le Bon) is beautiful with pale skin and raven hair. Her friend Lenka (Anna Geislerová), is an elegant redhead. Together they plot a complex plan to ambush the heavily-guarded Heydrich at a city intersection. Can false relationships turn to real love? Will their plan succeed? And if they do succeed who will survive the wrath of the occupying forces?
Anthropoid is a classic wartime thriller, based on real events. I liked this movie, though parts of it bothered me. Why do the main characters all speak English but with fake Czech accents?
And for a thriller, it starts out slow, with lots of waiting around… though it picks up handily later on, with a gripping and exciting battle scene. The main cast – the men are Irish, the women Canadian and Czech – is very attractive, almost more like models than actors. The period costumes, sets, and locations are beautifully done. So all in all, Anthropoid is an enjoyable espionage thriller.
Gleason and Anthropoid both open today in Toronto: check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
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