North Country (on DVD)

2005 was not a great year for actresses. There was a lack of strong female characters and female oriented movies. North Country was among a handful tailored to female audiences and showcased some very talented actresses. The movie fictionalizes the first sexual harassment class action lawsuit filed by a female miner against the iron mine. Screenwriter Michael Seitzman moves the timeline a few years back so that the movie could have another landmark event – the Anita Hill hearing as its backdrop. Director Niki Caro uses straightforward traditional approach to tell her story. Even though I could tell every step of the way which direction Caro is pulling me, I was still deeply affected by the characters and their struggles. The movie may be a bit too sentimental and melodramatic, but it is a feel-good movie that truly lifts up your spirit and fills your heart with hope. Caro knows how to use images to help with her storytelling. There are many ironies in the movie. For example, when the female miner Josey (played by Charlize Theron) talks with her supervisor about all the sexual harassments, we see a girlie calendar on her supervisor’s wall. The female cast of this movie is one of the best. Theron is just as powerful as in her Oscar winning movie Monster. Frances McDormand is sassy and no-nonsense as her best friend, a fellow miner Glory. Sissy Spacek transforms herself from a coal miner’s daughter 26 years ago to an iron miner’s wife and mom. She is equally spectacular as always.

I always have a tendency to rip Oscar. After watching this movie, I cannot help doing that again. Theron’s performance is far more natural and superb than Reese Witherspoon’s June Carter in Walk the Line. Unfortunately, because the movie was not as popular as Walk the Line, Theron’s performance was largely overlooked.

Munich (on DVD)

2005’s Munich is a rare adaptation – it cuts very little from the book it was based on. The book is 1984’s Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, written by George Jonas with the help of a former Israeli Mossad agent named “Avner”. The Israeli government has categorically denied the story in the book and I don’t expect we will ever hear the whole story from any official source. Mainly cutting the personal stories in the book, Steven Spielberg focuses his attention on the operation by Avner’s group. After the infamous Olympic village massacre in Munich, Israeli government sent out groups of “former” Mossad agents all over the world to carry out state-sponsored assassinations of terrorist leaders. In the movie, Spielberg depicts almost every single attack carried out by Avner’s group. I can only tell that one car bombing in the book is missing from the movie. Spielberg captures the essence of the book – revenge upon revenge only results in endless blood bath. It also depicts well the innate fear and self-doubt that humans possess naturally about any killing, even righteous ones. What sets us above all the other animals is our guild over killing. At the end of the book, all the killings took a heavy toll on Avner’s psyche. His decision to leave the Mossad didn’t sit well with the people there and he was clearly bitter about the whole experience. Money was withdrawn from his bank account and he was left penniless. Writing the book at that time could be both a catharsis and profitable means to support his family. Apart from a few small changes to make scenes more dramatic, Spielberg follows the book very faithfully, but as a movie, it is simply too LONG. It could have been better as a TV mini-series and Spielberg could have concentrated on one killing per episode. I am also not a fan of John Williams’ score. Spielberg has a tendency to depend on Williams’ melodramatic music to put us into the emotional stage he intends for the audience. I am always a believer in visual images and the filmmakers should have more trust in the audience. Eric Bana plays the lead role, Avner. He has always been more of a hunk than a real actor, but in this movie, he reaches into more depth and reveals more nuances than he has ever done. Putting away the common actor’s vanity, he even makes himself look heinous in a few scenes. In the book, besides the main plot line, Avner constantly had a longing for a normal life in his dream land, America and in the end, he settled into Brooklyn. Sometimes I wonder where the real Avner is now. More than 20 years after the book, peaceful refuges in the world has dwindled to almost none and America has become a new battle ground for terrorism.

The Illusionist

I was not mesmerized by the magic in director Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, but performances by his two star players, Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti, carried me through the entire movie, leaving me wish I could see more of them on screen together in the future.

The premise of The Illusionist is the impossible love between two people from opposite social classes and their longing to be together. The theme has been used by many artists over the centuries and remains very popular till this day. Burger has an eye for visual imagery and I very much love the faded look he gives to this period piece, but story wise he simply retreads on some familiar ground and doesn’t add anything new and exciting. The audience in the theater with me was very enthusiastic about this movie. They oohed when the twist was revealed in the end and clapped fervently for a long time after the movie was over. I didn’t find the ending surprising at all and in fact fully anticipated it. The audience reaction actually proved a point in this movie – people can be easily blinded by illusions.

I think The Illusionist is the first movie for Norton to play a romantic leading man and he completely dazzled me. Even since his creepy turn in Primal Fear, he has proved that he is one of the most talented actors among his peers. He worked with many stars of past and present and held his own with the likes of Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando. I only hope more directors will follow Burger’s lead to give Norton leading roles. He may not have Brad Pitt’s traditional good look, but his confidence, world-weariness, along with that bright sparkle in his eyes, are far more irresistible than Tom Cruise’s white-teethed grin and Pitt’s golden boy look. His scenes with Giamatti are so well acted by both of them that I wish it would never end. Giamatti is another actor that should get more leading roles. I, for one, would watch him do pretty much anything on screen. Jessica Biel is Norton’s love interest in the movie. And the critics are right about her – she is surprisingly good. Even though her role is still pretty much a beautiful decoration, she gives a restrained performance and shows a level of maturity that was not seen in any of her other movies. I do worry about Rufus Sewell’s career, though. In 1998, when he appeared in both Dangerous Beauty and Dark City, he was considered the next big thing in Hollywood. Yet his career floundered and he disappeared from American screens for a long time. Now he is back, but he has been given one jealous boyfriend role after another. He can clearly do more than just that. Philip Glass’ musical score is beautiful and helps Burger to give the movie a faster pace and tighter emotion pull.

It feels silly to see magic tricks in a movie. After all, what can be more magical than movie itself?

Hearts and Minds (on DVD)

With the war in Iraq raging on, it is even more poignant to watch the 1974 documentary, Hearts and Minds (winner of the 1975 best documentary Oscar). Director Peter Davis uses footages of the Vietnam War, interviews with policy makers, soldiers and their family members, Vietnamese, and Presidential speeches to show us conflicting views from all sides. Davis cleverly interweaves interviews and speeches with war footage, clearly exposing how reality differs from one’s intentions and even worse, how politicians may have lied to the American people and more alarmingly, how easily people could be fooled. The movie was made before the Fall of Saigon, but watching it, one can see the end is coming. It is ironic to see how western war propaganda movies are so similar to their counterparts in communist countries such as China. During the Red Scare era, American youths were basically fed the same kind of completely biased opinions about communism as the youths in communist countries were taught about capitalism. Americans’ extreme fear about communism led them into the Vietnam War, but they are really not that different from their enemies. They are fundamentally the same people – loyal to their causes and patriotic to their countries, except they have completely different political beliefs. The two iconic images always associated with the Vietnam War are both in this movie, but instead of being shown in the stillness of photographs, they are presented in real motions and equally haunting. The saddest part about this movie and other war documentaries like 2003’s Academy Award winner The Fog of War is that those war veterans all correctly predicted people would not learn their lessons from wars and there would always be more wars for future generations. When the pilots in Hearts and Minds talk about the technological advances in fighter jets from WWII to Vietnam War, it is downright depressing to know that humans have improved their killing skills and we can now simply kill more people at faster rates. Is Earth going to become what Ray Bradbury painted in his futuristic novels – a barren planet with mankind annihilated by all the super powerful weapons constantly being invented to destroy ourselves? “All we ask is to give peace a chance”, but unfortunately that seems to be always last on world leaders’ foreign policy agendas.