After all, there’s something especially stirring about the great leaders who overcome profound handicaps and quell their doubters as they rise to the throne. It goes back at least as far as bow-legged Spartan king Agesilaus and limping Roman emperor Claudius, the latter being played memorably by Derek Jacobi, who in a nice reversal here gets to play skeptic to Colin Firth’s monarch. And certainly there are few handicaps more prickly and relatable than stuttering. It is a battle my own father has fought all his life–in his younger years he too had a speech therapist (who, as he wistfully recalls, resembled Marisa Tomei).

Colin Firth certainly earned his Oscar (though I think he deserved it more for last year’s A Single Man)–his stammers are impressively authentic. Geoffrey Rush, as Logue, hits just the right notes of professional compassion and humble wit. I’m particularly impressed with Helena Bonham Carter’s performance as Firth’s wife (a.k.a. The Queen Mother), having learned that she was simultaneously filming Harry Potter as Bellatrix Lestrange–a role more or less the polar opposite. Equally strong is the writing and direction. David Seidler’s script is warm, clever and sharp. Director Tom Hooper, with his cinematographer Danny Cohen, shot the film in a strangely appealing palette, contrasting pale wintry light with the diffuse orange glow of electric light. The score, by Alexandre Desplat, is nicely understated in its own right, also dovetailing nicely with the extensive use of Beethoven throughout.

The prominence of good ol’ Ludwig Van in the film was actually something I found especially potent, particularly in later scenes involving the onset of World War II. Beyond the music’s intrinsic power, it subtly reflects the fact that, during the war, the Allies appropriated the German composer as their own. In fact, the 5th Symphony (which is not featured in the film) was repurposed, almost literally, as the drumbeat of Allied victory (the letter “V” in Morse code is da-da-da-daaah). You might think I’m making a connection where none exists, but I keenly feel that The King’s Speech was intended in part to remind us that while Hitler monstrously and foolishly strove to exterminate the handicapped (Seidler’s own grandparents were lost in the Holocaust), he was finally overcome by leaders who themselves were handicapped. In a particularly nice moment between Firth’s George and Churchill (Timothy Spall), Winston informs his King that though he struggled with his own speech impediment, he eventually learned to “make an asset of it.” Wise words indeed. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Biography/Drama/History

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 4/19/11

A far cry from the dreary social realism of England’s kitchen sink dramas of the 60’s, but perhaps needed in these times of global dollars in downturn, Made in Dagenham is a clichéd but chipper “us-against-them-yet-we’re-all-in-this-together” proto-feminist look at a real moment in the history of British labour.

Sally Hawkins plays Rita, a housewife who pulls up reserves of natural leadership when the union representative Albert (Bob Hoskins) inspires the women to say the time is now to fight for reclassification as skilled labor and the pay level that goes with it. What’s fair and right is the order of the day and subplots involving incompetent and/or calculating politicians and management along with tensions among family and friends point up the glue that binds us all.

Made in Dagenham has an enjoyable effervescence and never bogs down, and all concerned feel it’s a story worth telling, but there’s a “keep up the good work” mode to the film that adds to its cookie-cutter (or perhaps scones-cutter) feel. Norma Rae comparisons will be made and the intent was never to be Harlan County USA or Inside Job, but saying it doesn’t stand out as a film still won’t lump it in with The Secret of My Success (the up-with-capitalism-in-the-80’s Citizen Kane).

What’s on telly? Beehive hairdos, Wooly Bully on the hi-fi, equality of the sexes and “‘cor let’s have a cuppa”… but would Winston Churchill approve? – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Comedy/Drama/History

Rated R

Director: Nigel Cole

DVD Release Date: 3/29/11

The Social Network

Fincher certainly seems to see the rock star story inherent in the material, infusing it with all the sex, drugs and rock-n-roll an Internet start-up could plausibly have been fueled by. But Social Network is really an Aaron Sorkin movie, and all that that implies. Sure, it’s smart, witty and insightful, but it’s also smug, misleading and pretentious. My second warning: this is one of the most misogynistic films I’ve seen in a good while. Its female characters are either groupies (they are labeled as such) or the “voices of sanity,” who nevertheless spend much of their time breathless with awed incredulity at the nonsense Sorkin Factoids ™ spilling from the mouths of the neurotic male leads (i.e. “There are more people with genius-level IQs in China than there are people of any kind in the US”). I’m reluctant to place the blame for this on Sorkin, as in this respect (among others) it bears a striking resemblance to Fincher’s last over-lauded film, Fight Club.

My third warning: I realize this review is probably sounding like a fairly hostile rant, but, even though I’m puzzled by some prominent critics who have hailed this as the Movie of the Decade, I really do think it is among the better Hollywood films of 2010. It was beautifully (and appropriately) shot digitally with the Red One Camera, with Fincher’s trademark palette of dark golds and greens. The score, by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame, nicely accentuates the technological underpinnings of the drama. But the most admirable thing about The Social Network is the critical eye it turns to the Internet and the new brand of mass culture it has engendered. While the interpersonal drama unfolds in the foreground, the rapid spread in the background of Facebook itself almost plays out like a disease epidemic. It’s fair to ask whether Fincher and Sorkin are demonizing the geeks who created it, but it’s also fair to ask whether Zuckerberg is really Geek Triumphant or merely Patient Zero. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Biography/Drama

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 1/11/2011

Michael Sheen

Sheen proves–yet again–very adept at humanizing Blair, casting him as a bright, eloquent and starry-eyed leader. Helen McCrory reprises her role as Cherie Blair, along with Mark Bazeley as Alastair Campbell, Blair’s aide and spin doctor. Quaid’s Clinton is deceptively shrewd, though his Arkansas twang is maybe a little too studied. The biggest scene stealer is Hope Davis, who inhabits Hillary Clinton as though she were born for the role.

The Special Relationship was written by Peter Morgan, who also penned The Deal and The Queen, so anyone who enjoyed either of its predecessors will find its engaging tone and sharp, sympathetic characterizations familiar. One could call Morgan the British counterpart to “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, though I personally prefer his more natural style to Sorkin’s all-too-smug chattiness. He may still have another Blair biopic raring to go–the saga of his fateful alliance with Clinton’s successor and subsequent downfall. Anyone who has ever watched “Prime Minister’s Questions” on CSPAN knows that would make for a splendid tragedy. – [DVD]

Drama/History

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 11/30/10

Though the film is Spanish-produced, it was filmed in English, with Rachel Weisz portraying Hypatia herself. We first meet her leading a class in an ambitious cosmological inquiry. Her students, trapped in the fanciful dogmas that prevailed at the time, can’t quite keep up with her, but her young slave Davus (Max Minghella) takes her questions seriously, if only because he’s nursing a serious crush on her (who could blame him?). The city and its ruling aristocracy are still dominated by a pagan cult centered on Serapis, a god invented purely to help Egyptians get along with Greeks. Meanwhile, however, a young upstart religion is spreading rapidly among the oppressed lower classes of the city, and slaves like Davus: Christianity. Conflict between the wealthy pagan officials and the Christian masses grows increasingly violent, eventually threatening the great library and Hypatia herself.

Agora is a sharp critique of ascendant religious doctrines. Its Coptic Christians bear a strong resemblance to today’s Taliban, and commit similar horrors. Hypatia, meanwhile, is shown pushing the boundaries of ancient science in a plausible if completely-unrecorded-by-history manner. But that’s kind of the point: today we take science and its blessings for granted, while it has all too often rested on a razor’s edge. Much has been lost. It would be easy to call Agora the Passion of the Christ for the Secular Humanist set–indeed, having some familiarity with the history it depicts, I dreaded a climax that I fully expected to be just as bloody and gruesome. But Amenábar, to his credit, doesn’t revel in the nastier bits, instead repeatedly taking a step back–way, way back–pulling our eyes out into space itself, gazing back on the Earth as we know it now, reminding us that science has offered us lessons in humility that religion doesn’t always impart. - [DVD]

Adventure/Drama/History/Romance

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 10/19/10

Vincere tells the story of Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), lover and alleged first wife to Benito Mussolini (Filippo Timi). This couple, as presented in the film in the years before World War I, is a cockeyed pair, to say the least. He is a man in need of victory and conquest. She is extremely eager to have him conquer her. She bears him a son, Benito Albino Mussolini (played in his later years, again by Timi, as a bit of a nut himself). She even sells all of her possessions to raise money for his Socialist newspaper.

This relationship eventually comes to be swept under the rug by Mussolini and his Fascist regime, and Dalser and her son are separated and sent to a mental institution and Catholic orphanage, respectively. Il Duce only acknowledges his second marriage, with Rachele Guidi. No one, including Dalser herself, seem able to produce any proof of her marriage. Throughout all of this, Mezzogiorno sustains a glint of serene madness in her eyes, her worship for the eventual dictator apparently unflagging.

Stylistically, Vincere has a madness all its own, making ingenious use of stock and newsreel footage in an almost German Expressionist style, accompanied by an aggressive, martial score by Carlo Crivelli, with its percussive string motifs and plummeting glissandos. The overall effect is unsettling but entertaining in an over-the-top, pulpy way. In the end, Vincere doesn’t really try very hard to champion Dalser’s case, but rather examines the highest and lowest paths insanity can follow in a larger society, and how those paths are too often determined by violence and gender. – [DVD]

Biography/Drama/History

Rated R

Kielowski created influential works that delved into man’s relationship with the divine. At once looking for the connective tissue of faith and the flesh while at the same time posing the question of who is really responsible for the burden of spiritual guilt and the heavier burden of absolution.

In The Sun, director Aleksandr Sokurov takes the feeling of not knowing, and applies it to the final days of WWII and Japan’s surrender. Even involving a ruler believed by his people to be of divine descent, it is however the “not knowing” of an auteur more interested in this locus point of historical inevitability than as a meditation on the sacred and the secular.

Claustrophobic, elegant and fascinating, The Sun is a complete supposition of what may have occurred in those last days in Hirohito’s bunker. At times very abstract and yet incredibly intimate, and with an economy of language and locale, Sokurov is able to convey the yawning divide between Hirohito (Issei Ogata), his remaining subjects, the American forces embodied in General MacArthur (Robert Dawson) and the burden that history is about to lay at the feet of all concerned.

As portrayed by Ogata, Hirohito seems to exist inside and outside of himself at the same time. He’s a nervous, distracted scientist and poet who rarely displays the firmness of a leader and comes across more as an awkward wallflower at a dance than the leader of a country that threatened the stability and freedom of half the world. His interactions with his servants, American soldiers, his wife and MacArthur are played out like Waiting for Godot on separate alien chessboards. Most interesting are the moments of desperate interaction with his subjects and even an army interpreter, as all try to maintain Hirohito’s divinity as what remains of a cultural identity. Ogato doesn’t humanize Hirohito as much as use the character as a divining rod pointing to philosophical questions of power, destiny and responsibility. We’re always told absolute power corrupts absolutely and we’re told of the inevitable downfall of the powerful. But Hirohito was never a power-mad dictator. So what did he discern as his own humanity? He would have known that even if Japan would be rebuilt, that the toppling of an empire is a stopping point in history that will always exist out of time. Sokurov succeeds in showing that that humanity would never be untangled from the wreckage. – [DVD]

Drama/History

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 6/1/10

The rise of ‘revolutionary’ groups throughout the world, fueled by a potent mix of neo-Marxist rhetoric, resentment of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam and in the Middle East, racial strife, poverty, and a cult of personality which made, for a time, men like Black Panther leader Huey Newton a household name and martyrs like Che Guevara worldwide celebrities are the ghost in the machine of the romanticized 1960’s. In France, the students staged a riot against the government in 1968, exorcised by the sort of skewed worship of Chairman Mao, which Jean-Luc Godard documented in his ‘Dziga Vertov’ movement films. In West Germany, a terrorist group was formed from the shards of other movements, a loosely bound collective tied together by a pair of charismatic leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.

In this exceptional film, which was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2008, we are treated to a decidedly unglamorous examination of what was, between 1968–1974, a group that caused untold chaos towards what it considered a corrupt West German government. Meinhof, a leftist journalist (played without sympathy by Martina Gedeck), had railed against the German support of the world’s oppressive regimes, particularly America, but also Israel and Iran. Baader (a magnetic Moritz Bleibtreu) and his lover, Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) shared her anger, but were also more free-form in their violence, seemingly at times without a true point of view beyond ‘dope, guns & f**king in the street.’ Circumstance eventually brought Meinhof, who was in some ways the equivalent of the ‘limousine liberal’ slumming with the downtrodden, together with Baader‘s wayward outlaws, and they in time directed the group towards bank robberies to finance their efforts, justifying their actions with the words of Guevara and Mao. Meinhof was the intellectual rationalizer, Baader the passionate leader who made words into deeds, often with tragic consequence. It was doomed to fail in the end.

As was the case with the Panthers, an inability to properly formulate what exactly they wanted to accomplish caused the pedestal on which they’d placed themselves to topple over, accentuated by increased police pressure which eventually led to the arrest, or death, of all the group‘s members. If the first half of the film is, in many ways, compellingly streamlined action entertainment, it is in the second half where we see the consequences for their actions. Much like the exceptional Irish film Hunger, wherein revolutionaries are literally starved to death, we see the rotting away of the Baader Meinhof group behind prison walls, as solitary confinement leads to paranoia and suicide.

More telling, as associated members on the outside commit kidnapping and murders unbeknownst to the jailed leadership, we see their will slip away. They could no longer comprehend what it was that they believed in. Theirs was no ‘come to Jesus’ moment; instead, it is ‘What have we wrought?’

The design of the film is outstanding, with the periods evoked naturalistically, and the inclusion of actual news footage helps enormously when the passage of time is necessarily evoked. What is most important, and what seems to be the underlying message of the film, is the lack of any sort of nostalgic glorification of the group’s actions. Much like the oft-maligned Guevara t-shirts, time has diluted the horrific actions the protagonists of the film undertook into a sort of soft-focus moment, no matter their intent. (Guevara helped Cuba replace a dictator with a dictator. Nice work.) There is no need for history to be remembered if it’s only remembered as we wish it to be. – [DVD]

Action/Biography/Crime/Drama/History

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 3/30/10

To describe the narrative of Katyn is simple. The struggle for Polish occupation between the Soviet Red Army and the Nazi German Party brings forth the capture and eventual slaughter of thousands of Polish officers in the forest of Katyn. The emotional grip the film has on us will come from the detailing of a family-more specifically, the father, son, and husband, Andrzej’s character. He is an officer of the Polish army, and relentlessly denies escape from the Soviet gulag system due to his loyal standing for the Polish army. Most of the film takes place after the events of the Katyn massacre and is the discovery of what happened. One question I found myself asking throughout was whether or not Andrzej was missing in action or rather taken to the mass grave in Katyn. Anyhow, the narrative is a recalling of events for the most part rather than living in the moment.

Visually, this is one of Wajda’s best. The cinematography is a compilation of moody lighting and earthy tones. This foreshadows the events of Katyn forest well and also gives the film a very cold and tormenting display. Symbolism is also a very important highlight for the film. Religion is apparent in all of Wajda’s films and Katyn denies its dismissal as well. The faith of many of the soldiers helps them to carry on, as is apparent in the last ten minutes of the film, which may be the big shocking moment of the film itself. Katyn is a balance of beautiful cinematography and elegant lighting.

What I liked most about Katyn was how it humanizes the characters and shows how deep the ripple effect of war can carry. The massacre in Katyn and more specifically, that of Andrjez, affects not only the direct members of his family, but creates a chain-link if you will of death, hate and depression in those outside his family circle.  Katyn will please all from those looking for a realistic piece of history to those who wish for suspense and action. – [DVD]

Drama/History/War

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 8/11/09

Let it be known upfront that I am not against films made about the WWII era. Many of the greatest films of the 20th Century were drawn from that seemingly bottomless well, and there are undoubtedly fascinating stories still to be told. There is no question that, in terms of historical relevance, the World War II era may well be the most important we will ever know in our lifetimes. Larger-than-life characters, battles and the understanding of what might have been, for the world, politically, if not for Russian winters and a lack of available gasoline. The resistance movements that rose up in Hitler’s wake, throughout much of Europe and Scandinavia, were acts of self-sacrifice and nobility that seem, in this day and age, inconceivable. Many films, from Casablanca to Army of Shadows, have used solitary figures fighting against fascism as a background for cinematic greatness.

Valkyrie, despite a compelling story, is not one of them. It is, however, a reasonably enthralling thriller that maintains its suspense despite the decided handicap of being stuck with an ending that history will not allow director Bryan Singer to change. Herr Cruise stars as Claus von Stauffenberg, a colonel in the German army who joins a military coup of British ham actors to assassinate Hitler in hopes of ending the war and sparing Germany from certain defeat to the Allies. Stauffenberg’s intentions are noble, as he wants only to save his country and his family (with his wife, Nina, played to little effect by WWII-film vet Carice van Houten, the resistance-seductress of Black Book), although it is without question that the loss of his hand, eye and accent in a bombing raid in Africa during the film’s opening moments have left him more than a little resentful, as well.

Much has been made about the fact that Cruise forgoes even attempting a German accent after the film’s opening scene, but it seems a mild complaint. Most American actors are dreadful at accents, exaggerating the nuances to such a degree that they sound like parodies, so it’s better Cruise not bother with the harsh Teutonic dialect lest he end up sounding like a cross between Erich von Stroheim and Colonel Klink. The fact that Singer chose British actors (an able cast headed by Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Izzard, Tom Wilkinson and Terence Stamp) to play Germans instead of, say, actual Germans says a lot about what era this movie truly evokes, whether Singer intended it or not.

That would be the dead ball era of 1960’s Hollywood, where the stories were writ larger than life and this exact movie would have starred Rock Hudson and Alec Guinness. Valkyrie is meant to be a blockbuster, and there’s nothing wrong with that, as there is nothing wrong with this film. Cruise and company aimed high, and came up a bit short, but as another in the endless WWII pictures it’s just that – another one. If you’re looking in that big encyclopedia I mentioned. and come to the letter ‘V’, perhaps you should try the movie Victory, a resistance picture starring Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine and Pele as members of an Allied soccer team fighting the Nazis, instead. It was directed by John Huston, who used to make these kinds of pictures in his sleep, and Stallone never fakes an accent either. Not even an American one. – [DVD] – [Blu-Ray]

History/Thriller/War

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 5/19/09