United 93

I watched United 93 with a heavy heart. One can’t help it. We all know what happened to that plane, but it does not diminish the impact Paul Greengrass’ understated movie has on me.

United 93 is a real time account of the doomed flight on September 11, 2001, a day that will forever live in infamy along with Japanese Pearl Harbor attack on this country. Actually these may be the only two plane attacks on American soil. The movie opens menacingly – New York City peacefully asleep, unaware the evil around it. From that point on the movie plays out like a docudrama, a reenactment of real-life events pieced together based on the phone records, recollections and certain stretch of imagination.

The whole movie has a grainy, hand-held camera look. People and locations all look so natural that one may feel the movie has directed itself. That is the exact genius of Greengrass in making this movie. He shows no sentimentality, points no finger and makes no political statement, yet the movie soars above the usual disaster and based-on-true-events genre. If one pays attention, one can discern some carefully crafted images. For example, when United 93 takes off, Greengrass has only the plane body to fill the screen. With the cockpit pointing upwards, it resembles a missile which is exactly what the terrorists used the planes for on that fateful day. There is no leading man/lady in this picture. Everyone except the terrorists is an ordinary citizen unknowingly involved in a maelstrom. Greengrass uses almost no music to help us feel what transpires on the screen. When Todd Beamer uttered that famous “Let’s roll”, there is nothing to emphasize its impact. It is simply like any other exchanges among the passengers.

Greengrass uses no stars in this movie, but the movie is not filled with a bunch of unknown actors. If you watch enough movies, you will recognize quite a few familiar faces. These are character actors who have appeared in countless movies as supporting roles.

United 93 is definitely not mindless entertainment or may not even qualify for entertainment. There is nothing entertaining watching a group of people walk into their deaths. When I was watching it, there were so many what ifs in my mind. What if there had been a mechanical problem with the plane, what if Mark Bingham had missed the plane, what if we already had strict no-knife rule for boarding a plane, what if all flights had been grounded the minute someone suspected there was a hijacked plane. The movie also exposes Americans’ false sense of security and their complacency with the status quo. It takes the second plane to hit the World Trade Center for air traffic controllers to understand the severity of the situation on hand. When American 11 first stops communication, it seems unthinkable that it is hijacked. When there is a real attack on our country, there seems to be only confusion and chaos. There is no clear chain of command and no leader is willing to make grave decisions.

In the end, the movie is not about heroes, but about a human tragedy. None of the passengers on the plane thought about stopping the attack; they thought about saving themselves. They didn’t want to be heroes; they only wanted to be alive. With their lives on the line, they acted far more heroically than those on land. The movie pays tribute to them, but it is also a paean of the human spirits – our desire for survival prompts us to fight any insurmountable obstacles. Once I read in a fortune cookie that “bravery is the capacity to perform properly when scared half to death.” United 93 is clearly a proof of that.

Lifeboat (on DVD)

1944’s Lifeboat is a true masterpiece. I have always been a fan of Alfred Hitchcock. After watching this movie, I realize that I still don’t worship this man enough. While taking a few film courses in college, I noticed that Lifeboat was used far more frequently in textbooks than other famous Hitchcock works. Now I understand why.

The entire movie takes place in a lifeboat, but don’t let the simple setting fool you. There are so many twists and turns, so many different genres mixed into one movie. It is a suspense, a romance and a political drama. Nobel-winning author John Steinbeck touches on some edgy subjects in the movie that are still relevant today. The movie keeps us on our seats throughout and begs us to consider both humanity and the darkest corner in our nature. The movie was made during WWII and is about WWII, but soars above all the propaganda movies churned out by the studio. Its even-handed treatment of the German captain is not even common in today’s war movies. The movie can also serve as a lesson to current filmmakers about how to display violence on screen. Hitchcock didn’t show any violence or gore in the movie. Every time when there are some violent acts, we only see people’s backs. However, it is far more powerful to one’s psyche than blatant display of fights and blood.

This movie may also be the only well-known one that stars the Broadway legend, Tallulah Bankhead. She may be a little hard to watch at the beginning because of her tendency of overacting for stage audiences, but gradually her character grows on you. Even though Hitchcock didn’t make a cameo in this movie (it is impossible to do that for this movie. Once you see it, you will know why.), his presence is still felt (look for it).

The movie also once again proves that the Academy doesn’t reward deserving artists. The movie was not even nominated for Best Picture that year (the winner was Going My Way. Trust me it is a far inferior movie.) Hitchcock was nominated for Best Director, but along with Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity) and Otto Preminger (Laura), lost to Leo McCarey (Going My Way). In fact, Hitchcock never won an Oscar in a contested category. Nowadays those three movies have all become classics, high on all the critics’ lists where they should be. Rent all three if you can, but at least watch Lifeboat.

A Prairie Home Companion

Robert Altman is an American master at putting together an ensemble movie and A Prairie Home Companion is his latest venture in that genre.

The movie follows the fictional last performance of Garrison Keillor’s long-running radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. In between the performances, the audience also gets to experience what happens backstage during the show. This movie is my first taste of this celebrated radio show and it really strikes me more as a concert film than anything else. Keillor is famous for his storytelling and Midwest sense of humor, but this movie does not dwell too much on his observations about life and acts mainly as a showcase for American folk music.

Laurence Olivier once said there are “no small roles, only small actors.” Altman’s movies are proof of that. Because of his reputation, he always attracts talented actors to appear in his ensemble movies. The stars in this movie all give very naturalistic performance. Actually nobody is really a movie actor in this film. Like their roles in the movie, they have all become stage performers and entertainers. And entertain is what they did. Everyone did his/her own singing in the movie and they succeeded in showing the audience another side of them that we have rarely seen.

I saw this movie right after watching The Lost City. Music is a major theme in both movies. In The Lost City, music and other cultural movements are under censorship because of ideological control. In A Prairie Home Companion, American folk music has also become a thing of the past because of profit-driven corporate culture. It is a shame that many young generations are not exposed to this simplistic but expressive music.

A Prairie Home Companion may be slow-paced and may lack a dramatic story line, but it takes us to a bygone era and makes us appreciate an old medium that has been too long in the shadow of TV.

The Lost City

There are usually two kinds of movies about revolutions in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America during the 50s and 60s. One tends to romanticize the revolutionaries and the other takes the ordinary people’s points of view. Andy Garcia’s directorial debut, The Lost City, is clearly the latter.

Garcia came to America with his Cuban parents at age of five and has only returned once, to the US naval base on the island to do a concert for Cuban refugees. It took Garcia more than 15 years to complete this film and anyone who watches it can see this is a labor of love and nostalgia. The story revolves around three brothers from a wealthy family in the late 50s’ Havana. With Castro’s revolution in the air, the three siblings have chosen three different paths: The oldest one Fico (played by Garcia), a club owner, chooses to stay neutral; the middle one Luis becomes a martyr for the cause; the youngest one Ricardo opts for joining Che Guevara’s guerrilla force.

The movie is an ode to Havana of the past, Paris of Latin America. Garcia recreated Havana in the Dominican Republic with lush color, exuberant spirit and above all, Cuban music and dance. Legendary Cuban exile, novelist Gabriel Cabrera Infante cleverly wrote Fico as a nightclub owner so that Garcia could have an ample opportunity to showcase all those marvelous music and dance numbers. The music and dance alone are worth the price of this movie. For people living outside Miami, we don’t hear enough Cuban jazz and watch enough Cuban dances, a special kind of strong, sexy and passionate movement. The movie runs almost two and half hours. I don’t think Garcia has a heart to cut many sequences in the editing room. In order to make the movie pace faster, Garcia frequently has two scenes go on almost simultaneously. For example, when Fico is asked by the secret police chief about some Castro supporter, we see Fico’s flashback mingled with Fico’s response. In this way, we see both what Fico really knows and what he says to the chief. In another case, Fico comes to his family’s Sunday dinner later and while his father talks to him, we see back and forth why he is late and what happens at another dinner earlier. What has transpired in the other dinner reflects well his father’s advice.

If The Motorcycle Diaries portrayed Che Guevara as a hero, The Lost City has shown the other side of this revolutionary. When Che guns down an already injured enemy, he is no different from Batista’s head of secret police who coldheartedly kills wounded freedom fighter at the step of Batista’s palace.

The movie stars a large Hispanic cast and Garcia does a competent job here. The most beautiful Spanish face in the fashion industry, Ines Sastre, plays Garcia’s love interest Aurora and a symbol for Cuba and Havana. As Fico says in the movie - “Beauty is [her] nature” – Sastre shines on the screen. In her first major English language role, Garcia understands Sastre’s limitations and utilizes her beauty well. Many shots of Fico and Aurora’s courtship look just like Sastre’s ad spreads on many magazines, which is the image that Garcia wants to convey about Havana – a romantic paradise with metropolitan polish. However, because Garcia obviously uses Sastre as a surrogate for his beloved country and city, Aurora’s character is thin and erratic at times. It is very hard to fathom how she suddenly transforms from a merely beautiful face to some idealistic young woman ultra loyal to Castro’s cause. She apparently represents beautiful Cuba trapped in a dictator’s ideology, but the connection completely throws her character development off course. Also, though Dustin Hoffman and Bill Murray are two brilliant actors, I don’t really know the purposes of their roles. They don’t add much to the story and can be easily cut to save some screen time for more dance and music.

The ending of the movie may seem too political and preachy to many people, but I find the poem and song both lyrical and moving. It simply shows how strongly Garcia feels about his motherland.

As it is often the case in revolutions, we simply get one tyrant replace another and endure new if not more suffering as a result. In the movie, there are constant conflicts and choices between one’s family and one’s country. Which is above which, or can we really separate the two? It is heartbreaking to see a country ruined, a city lost, a culture oppressed, a life style pass us by before we are ready to let it go, and especially a family destroyed and torn apart.