Eva's 2014 Movie List

Eva's 2014 Movies Most Worthy of Mention, in no special order. The ones Herman saw too are *’d.

1. *Philomina ©2013, Dir. Stephen Frears, with Judi Dench and Steve Coogan. Deservedly nominated for four Oscars. Dramatization of a true story. In 1952 unwed pregnant teenager Philomina was exiled to a one of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. Her son, Anthony, was adopted at age two with her formal consent, but not her free-will consent. Many years later her daughter learns of this and puts her mother in contact with a journalist who helps her track down what happened to Anthony.

2. *12 Years a Slave ©2013. Directed by Steve McQueen, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor. Based on an 1854 Book by Solomon Northup who was a free man from NY kidnapped into slavery during an 1841 business trip to Washington D.C. Won Best Picture Oscar.

3. *Captain Phillips ©2013 Dir. Paul Greenglass. Based on a true story about Somali pirates in 2009 attempting to “catch” the Maersk Alabama, a cargo ship heading for Mombassa. It was too big to handle—there were just four pirates in a motor boat-- so they settled for kidnapping the captain for ransom, having disdained his offer of $30,000 cash from the safe to leave them alone. Tom Hanks plays Rich Phillips, Catherine Keener his wife, and Barkhad Abdi plays the pirate leader. Navy Seals to the rescue.

4. *The Last King of Scotland ©2006 Dir Kevin McDonald. Forest Whittaker won the Best Actor award for his portrayal of Idi Amin. James McAvoy was well-cast as the newly graduated doctor who goes to Africa yes to help people, but also for a lark and to avoid a boring life in Scotland. Simon McBurney plays an experienced reporter, whom Nicolas tells off for “not giving Amin a chance.” Nicolas lives to be disabused of his naïvete . I had to leave the room during some of the torture scenes.

5. *The Theory of Everything ©2014. 123 min. Dir. James Marsh. Screenplay by Anthony McCarten based on a book by Jane Hawking, w/ Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking, Felicity Jones as Jane Hawking, Charlie Cox as Jonathan, Jane’s choirmaster and second husband, Maxine Peake as Elaine, Stephen’s nurse and second wife, and Harry Lloyd as Brian, Stephen’s grad school roommate. MaryDan, Herman and I enjoyed this together the day after Thanksgiving at the Kendall Square Cinema.

6. *Goodbye Mr. DeVries. ©2012. Dutch. 5 minute animation by Huub Kistemaker, directed by Mascha Halberstad, inspired by a real person. http://www.dragonframe.com/blog/2013/12/halberstad-goodbye-mr-de-vries/. A ton of charm and emotion in 5 min!

7. *Nebraska. ©2013 Dir. Alexander Payne. And I thought I didn’t like road movies. It spoke to me. Herman only thought it was so so. Black and white. Visually beautiful scenes of emptiness. Bruce Dern as Woody Grant who thinks he’s won $1,000,000 from Publishers Clearing House. Will Forte plays his son who drives him from Billings Montana to Lincoln Nebraska to claim his prize (or not), stopping to visit relatives along the way. Jane Squibb plays Woody’s wife. Nominated for six Academy Awards.

8. Finding Vivian Maier (1926-2009) ©2013. 83 min. A documentary by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel. about V.M, a photographer whose fame is entirely posthumous. She was a live-in nanny in Chicago. It’s a people-watching film, both the photos and the interviewees. Bob Cooper looked forward to seeing this while in Washington D.C. but it was sold out! I was lucky to catch it at the Kendall Square Cinema one of the Wednesdays someone was with Herman until 8pm.

9. *TV: Madame Secretary We both look forward to this every Sunday evening; Herman watches The Big Bang Theory often, if there’s nothing better on such as The Bruins. I have seen enough en passant to vouch for the writing and casting. Very amusing.

10. Stories We Tell Dir. Sarah Polley ©2012. 109 minutes. Canada. Docudrama. An actress, Rebecca Jenkins, plays Diane Polley, the director’s mother, who died when Sarah was 11, on Super-8 faux home movies. It was effective. It’s a portrait of complicated family relationships. The play The Caretaker attracted Diane to Michael Polley. She fell in love with his role. The real man was self-proclaimed duller. But he was a good father. A subsequent affair called into question Sarah’s paternity.

11. *Take This Waltz, dir Sarah Polley, with Michelle Williams and Seth Rogan as Margo and Lou, a happily married couple. Visually colorful. New guy Daniel (Luke Kirby) across the street meets Margo in a charmingly flirtatious situation. Daniel pulls a rickshaw (in Toronto!) to pay the rent. Sarah Silverman plays Geraldine, an alcoholic relative on Lou’s side who’s on the wagon. Margo falls in love with Daniel. Geraldine slips off the wagon to tell Margo off. OK, so Lou could not think of anything to say at their 5^th anniversary movie and dinner date. Couldn’t Margo have let him know what was at stake by introducing her conversational gambit? “I’m in love with Daniel.” Or “I’m ready for a baby now.” Or just offer her response to the movie.

12. *The Man Nobody Knew. In Search of my Father CIA Spymaster Wm. Colby, a documentary by Carl Colby. ©2011. Unsatisfyingly impersonal, except for the interviews with the director’s 90 year old mother. She was shocked when her husband wanted a divorce after 39 years of marriage, so she didn’t know Bill Colby (1920-1996) either. “But we’re Catholics!” She loved their years in Rome. One of their 5 children was born there. They were stationed in Saigon from 1959-61. When Bill went back alone 1969-72 Barbara was the loyal wife even though friends of theirs even from the CIA were starting to turn away from the war. Bill told the truth to Congress so was hated by some. Carl speculates on his father’s death by canoe. Murder? Semi- suicide?

13. *Brideshead Revisited ©1981 11-part miniseries on library DVD, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh (©1945). Dir. Charles Sturridge, with Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder, Anthony Andrews as Sebastian Flyte, Claire Bloom as Lady Marchmain, Diana Quick as Julia Flyte, Phoebe Nichols as Cordelia Flyte, Simon Jones as Bridey. John Gielgud, Lawrence Olivier, Mona Washburne, and Jeremy Sinden are also in it. It’s an examination of the Roman Catholic, aristocratic Marchmain family, as seen by the narrator, Charles Ryder. Charles (No fortune or family) and the handsome, dissolute Sebastian (he of teddy bear fame) become friends at Oxford during the 1920’s. Charles reminisces nostalgically when he is bivouaced during WW II at the once great estate of Brideshead. I found the the book memorable years ago. In Claire Bloom’s autobiography she writes that she interpreted Lady Marchmain, not as an insufferable matriarch, but as a devout woman truly concerned for her offsprings’ souls.

14. *To Serve Them All my Days. 4-DVD TV series (1980-81) adapted by Andrew Davies from the novel by R.F. Delderfield. David Powlett-Jones (John Duttine), a miner’s son and WW I vet, gets a job teaching history at Bamfylde. Algie Herries (Frank Middlemass), the headmaster who mentors him, and Algie’s wife Ellie (Patricia Lawrence), are refreshing.

15. *Railway Man ©2013 Dir. Jonathan Tepilitsky. w/ Colin Firth as Eric Lomax, Nicole Kidman as his wife, and Stellan Skarsgard as his friend. Jeremy Irvine is well cast as the young Eric. He looks like Firth. Based on the autobiography of Eric Lomax, who was captured at the fall of Singapore in 1942 and made a slave laborer on the Thai-Burma railway. Tortured by Takeshi Nagase, he suffered from PTSS. Forty years later he learns that Nagase is running a war museum at the site of the prison camp. He goes there and confronts him. Flirtation dialog when Eric and Patti started courting: “What a surprise!” “What a coincidence!” Pause. “It’s not entirely a coincidence.” “It’s not entirely a surprise.” Eric’s hobby is RR enthusiast. Hiroyuki Sanada as the old Nagase.

16. *Dear Pyongyang. ©2005 Documentary by Yong-hi Yang, which I think could have been condensed to a 20 minute short, but I learned a lot. The director was 5 in 1971 when her parents, ethnic Koreans living in Japan, sent their three other children, all sons, the youngest 14, to live in North Korea. 90,000 others “returned” too. The boys all married and had children. Their relatives sent huge boxes of supplies regularly from Japan so those “returnees” were better off than most North Koreans. (Though I read in Dear Leader that eventually there was a backlash against returnees, who were barred from jobs because of their tainted backgrounds) The director made her first trip to Pyongyang in 1983. She was only allowed to spend a few minutes with her brothers. She’s made half a dozen trips since then. We also learn about her parents’ courtship and 50+ year marriage, both good.

17. Rosewater ©2014 Dir Jon Stewart, but don’t expect it to be funny. It’s not even fun. But it does flesh out a real news story from 2009. Based on the book And Then They Came for Me by Maziar Bahari, starring Gael Garcia Bernal. A London based Iranian journalist was detained in Iran for 118 days because of a satirical interview. Or maybe it was because he filmed some post election demonstrations. He was also accused of pornography. Not knowing why he was arrested was part of the horror. Solitary confinement, beatings, and compromising one’s ideals by saying publicly that journalists lie to undermine Iran, thinking it would result in freedom, but of course it did no such thing, were other horrors. My favorite scene was seeing the prisoner dance joyously in solitary (his keepers had a surveillance camera on him) after hearing that his wife was well and her pregnancy nearing term.

18. *If You Could Say It in Words. ©2008, Written and Directed by Nicholas Gray. A very realistic portrayal of the start of an affair between Sadie (Marin Ireland) and a very bright young artist, Nelson (Alvin Keith), who has difficulty communicating even though he could be occasionally articulate. The word Aspergers was only mentioned in the worthwhile DVD bonus section. Alex Plank, autism activist, called it "...the most authentic portrayal of an autistic person I've ever seen in the movies."

19. *The Space Between, ©2010 Dir.Travis Fine. w/ Melissa Leo as Montine, a tough broad who’s on probation as an airline stewardess. Her mother’s dying and she’s grieving over her husband who we presume has left her but we presumed wrong. She’s put in charge of Omar (Anthony Keyvan) , a devout, bright, 10 year old Pakistani who’s travelling alone from NYC to LAX. She sees him hugging his single-parent father goodbye at the airport. Before they get to LA their plane is grounded. It’s 9/11. Omar sees images of the towers and tells Montine that his father’s second job was in the restaurant on top, but he’s reached his father on the phone. Next you see them on a bus to NYC. They get kicked off when Omar prays in the aisle. They visit her family in Ohio.

20. *Nobody Knows ©2004 2 hrs. 19 min. Dir Kore-Eda Hirokazu. Based on a true story that shocked Japan. 12 yr old Yagira Yuya won the best actor award at Cannes. From the DVD box: “A childlike mother of four sneaks her children into their new apartment as if it were a game. One of the rules is that only Akira, the eldest, can go outside. The mother leaves. As the money runs out and the utilities are shut off Akira struggles to take care of his siblings.” Yuki, 5, falls off a chair and dies! Akira and his new friend, Saki, put her in a suitcase and bury Yuki in a desolate area. This director is superb with children: I Wish. ©2011 is on my 2012 list. That one is about two grade-school-aged boys one of whom lives with their mother, the other with their father.

21. *American Revolutionary, the Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs ©2013 84 min. by documentary filmmaker Grace Lee (no relation). Thanks, Marie for the recommendation! GLB, a 98 yr old Chinese-American philosopher, writer, activist (Labor and Civil Rights), and speaker, lives in Detroit and has a great smile. Revolts/riots are expressive, oftentimes understandably. Revolution is harder. It requires creativity to fit it to the times. Grace faces old age frankly. She engages with people of all ages.

22. *Bridegroom. ©2013 80 min. Dir Linda Bloodworth Thomason. Documentary about two gay guys from small towns in Montana and Indiana respectively who had six happy years together before Tom’s accidental death at age 29. This movie is producer Shane Bitney Crone’s monument to Tom. Shane’s mother was a great interviewee. Shane and Tom’s friends, many of them women, contributed their points of view. Shane was barred from Tom’s funeral and deathbed. Funded by kickstarter.com

23. *Body & Soul Dir. Moira Armstrong. ©2013. A Masterpiece Theater production set in 1992 starring Kristin Scott Thomas. Sr. Gabriel, nee Anna Gibson, has been 16 years in a contemplative-with-farming community in Wales. She’s good at it. She can drive and repair a tractor and keep the books. Her brother, who has been ineptly managing the Gibson Woolen Mills in Bradford, dies, so Sr. Gabriel gets leave to help her pregnant sister-in-law with her young children. Based on a novel by Marcelle Bernstein.

24. *Quartet ©2012, Director Dustin Hoffman. Starring Maggie Smith, Tom Courtney, Michael Gambon and Billy Connolly. About an assisted living facility for retired musicians putting on a benefit opera gala to support the place. Herman loved it.

25. Beginners ©2010 Writer/Director Mike Mills. 105 min, w/ Ewan McGregor as Oliver, 38, and Christopher Plummer as Oliver’s father, Hal, 79, a widower after 44 years of marriage. Hal drops two bombs on Oliver. He is dying and he has a young male lover (Goran Visnjic). His wife knew of his proclivities in 1955 when they married. In parallel with this, a courtship between Oliver and Anna (Melanie Laurent) is just beginning to develop. We learn that Oliver has let four serious relationships die on the vine. We root for Anna. A Jack Russell terrier delivers some lines as subtitles. That device works.

26. *Nanking ©1997. 90 min. Directors Bill Gutentag & Dan Sturman. Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemmingway play American missionaries. Actors played historical witnesses very effectively. Newsreel film of the events are incorporated. I had not known before that Nanking used to be the capital of China. I left the room occasionally, unable to face another atrocity. Library DVD.