Eva's 2015 Movie List

Eva's 2015 Movies Most Worthy of Mention, in chronological order of my seeing them. Herman saw the first three with me.

1. The Imitation Game ©2014 Dir Morten Tyldum w/ Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing. Keira Knightly plays a woman math whiz on the fringe of the team. I read the biography by Andrew Hodges years ago. Alan Turing is a hero.

2. If These Walls Could Talk ©1996 Dirs Nancy Savoca and Cher. Three strong dramas, each about a woman in an abortion-related plight, set in 1952, 1974, and 1996, and starring. resp., Demi Moore & Catherine Keener, Sissy Spacek, and Ann Hecht.

3. Unbroken ©2014, Dir. Angelina Jolie based on the superb non-fiction book by Laura Hillenbrand about Louis Zamperini (1917-2014), Olympic runner and survivor of 47 days in a raft after a WW II crash, followed by years in a Japanese prison camp. It’s a story well worth filming. With Jack O’Connell as L.Z. I saw this at Assembly Row with Herman the weekend before he died.

4. Wild ©2014. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee, screenplay by Nick Hornby based on the acclaimed memoir by Cheryl Strayed, with Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern. Young woman heals herself by walking the Pacific Rim Trail. The cold walk to the Somerville Theater was good for me Jan 16, after everyone had gone home from Herman’s Jan. 15 funeral

5. Mr Turner (Br) ©2014. Dir. Mike Leigh. Timothy Spall plays JMW Turner at the peak of his career. Ruth Sheen plays his estranged wife, & Hannah Danby his maid. John Ruskin is an officious prig. Constable is a rival. Turner is an unattractive jerk but a very sensible woman married him late in life. Wonderful casting except Turner’s father looks the same age as his son.

6. A Simple Life (HK) Dir Ann Hui, screenplay by Susan Chan, w/ Deanie Ip and Andy Lau. Inspired by a true story. Roger Ebert called it one of 2011’s best. Ah Tau has worked for 4 generations of the Leung family. The Leungs have moved to California but their son travels for his work to China. He houses and attentively checks on retired Ah Tau. She insists on going into an old folks home, so it was interesting to see that place in Hong Kong. A deep relationship and old age movingly depicted. DVD.

7. The Hunting Ground ©2015 Dir. Kirby Dick. Documentary about sexual assault on campus. Takeaway: Sexual assault reports should be taken seriously and respectfully. Crimes should be reported to the police, not handled internally. In practice this campus epidemic—much evidence shown of its pervasiveness— has often been handled by first protecting the institution.

8. Ocean Heaven (China) ©2010. Dir: Xue Xiaolu (a woman), w/ Jet Li as a widower and aquarium employee dying of liver cancer (for most of the movie only he knows it) who is devoted to his 21 yr old autistic son Dafu (Wen Xincheng).

9. Woman in Gold (Br) ©2015 Dir. Simon Curtis. Dramatization of a true story. Gustav Klimpt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was stolen by the Nazis. Until 2004 it hung in the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna. International court cases and arbitration returned it to American Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren), Adele’s niece. Maria’s friend’s son, Randy Schoenberg, argued at the Supreme Court.

10. Selma ©2014 Dir Ava DuVernay, writer Paul Webb, w/ David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, Carmen Ejoyo as Coretta Scott King, and Oprah Winfrey as a woman who can’t get registered to vote because she could not name Mississippi’s 62 judges. Tim Roth plays Gov. George Wallace, Tim Wilkerson LBJ. I jumped out of my seat when the 4 little girls were blown up in the Birmingham church. It was shocking to see Americans in uniform and also civilians beating people up in the street 20 years after the Nazis. Even though I knew the broad outline of events I was riveted. LBJ needed to be leaned on to pass Civil Rights laws.

11. Life Itself ©2015. Dir Steve James. I had loved the autobiography of Roger Ebert (1942-2013) of the same title. Ebert married at age 50. We see his wedding. We see his funeral. We get to know Chaz more than still photos permit. They met at an AA meeting. There’s a lot about the partnership/rivalry with Gene Siskel. There are rehab and hospital scenes I could relate to. Plus this documentary is a selective overview of the history of movies in my lifetime. Talking heads too, but interesting ones.

12. The Salt of the Earth ©2014 Directors Wim Wenders and Juliano Salgado. Documentary about the life and work of Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado (1944- ). One of the directors is his son. One is reminded of Louis Kahn’s son making that great movie My Architect in part to get to know the father who was away so much. Many of the photographs were so beautifully composed I just wanted to look at them longer than they were on the screen. Wars & social history of our times as well as the state of all the ends of the earth are themes. I was also interested in the way the Salgado land in Brazil is being restored to nature.

13. Anita (Argentina) ©2009. The story of a young woman with Down’s Syndrome (Alejandra Manzo—she really has Down’s Syndrome) who lives a happy routine life with her widowed mother (academy award nominee Norma Aleandro) in Buenos Aries. One day in 1994 everything changes when a bomb explodes in their street. Anita gets lost in the chaos, and wanders alone for days, meeting people and coping surprisingly well. Her brother and his wife search for his mother and sister. DVD

14. Anita, Speaking Truth to Power ©2013. Documentary by Freida Mock. 77 min; DVD Extras: 117 min. Highly recommended by Marie and Kathy, and rightly so. Brings back watching that congressional hearing at McCanns’ in 1991. We also see Anita today. She teaches at Brandeis. Anita’s mother and 12 sibs were supportive. Watched with Sheila and the Coopers May 10.

15. Citizenfour ©2014 Best Documentary award for director Laura Poitras, and it was up against some worthy competition --Finding Vivian Maier and The Salt of the Earth, to name the two other nominees that I saw. I watched Citizenfour on the web thanks to a link given me by Alan Wadja in a dragongoserver.com comment area. Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Wm. Binney and Julian Assange are interviewed about the NSA surveillance revelations. Poitras got access to subjects in hiding.

16. The Wolfpack ©2015. Dir Crystal Moselle A documentary about the Angula family who live in a housing project in NYC. The parents, Osacar (Peruvian) and Suzanne were Hare Krishna devotees so the six late-adolescent sons and their little sister all have names like Bhagavan, Mukunda and Krisna. What’s most unusual, though, is that no one but Oscar went outside AT ALL for years, until shortly before this movie was made. The kids had a huge library of videos they knew by heart, and they were remarkably creative in staging re-enactments. Now we see the boys exploring the city in a pack. One even gets his own place and a girlfriend. We see Suzanne making a phone call to her own mother telling her she has seven kids—it’d been that long.

17. Breaking Bad ©2008-2013, all 6 seasons on library DVDs. w/ Bryan Cranston as Walter White, the high school chemistry teacher and family man who for reasons this space does not permit me to explain maintains a parallel life running a meth lab. Conor told me RJ Mitte, who plays Walt Jr., really has Cerebral Palsy. The wonderful characters are at the heart of this great show: Skylar White (Anna Gunn), Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), Hank Schrader (Dean Norris), Marie Schrader (Betsy Brandt)., Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk)--I could go on. I had been hearing raves about this for years, but the drug element did not appeal, and I’m not much for TV. But then I heard that Dan Drumm (my cousin, 1948-2015) had loved it so I tried it. It’s real good!

18. Trembling Before G-D ©2001 84 min documentary about gay Orthodox Jews trying to reconcile their sexuality with their religion. The fascinating extras are on a separate DVD. One engaging woman lost 137 lbs and gained a ton of confidence by the extras. I loved the silhouettes during the credits. Dir. Dubowski could not film any of the high holidays because the orthodox cannot run a camera then. His solution was those designer representations. At Sundance, gay Mormons flocked to see it. In other cities Orthodox Jews and Evangelical Christians demonstrated against it. “We are inspiring interfaith dialog,” says Dubowski.

19. After Stonewall ©2001 Dir John Scagliotti. Documentary with interviews and archival video, of, e.g., Anita Bryant. Again, great DVD bonus tracks richly supplement the 88 min documentary. I’ve put the prequel Before Stonewall on my library request list.

20. Little White Lie ©2015 PBS Independent Lens. Lacey Schwartz was raised Jewish in Woodstock NY. She wasn’t adopted. It never occurred to her until late in h.s. that she was not white, but it occurs to us when we look at her photos and home movies from birth on, even though we are given the explanation that a grandfather was “Sicilian.” Home from college Lacey confronts her mother and gets the facts. We see her marrying at age 30 and keeping her name—the perfect blend of Jewish and Black. It’s a fascinating film about denial, family secrets and the importance of Communication. (echoes of JaneT. Crawford’s pet theme).

21. Lincoln ©2012 Dir. Steven Spielberg, screenplay by Tony Kushner based on Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. The movie only covers the very end of Lincoln’s Presidency, when he is striving to get the 13^th Amendment (forbidding slavery) passed. It seems the Emancipation Proclamation was sort of like an executive order—overturnable by the next president.

22. Pride (Br) ©2014 dir Matthew Warchus. Docudrama about LGSM (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) in 1984. It’s reminiscent of The Full Monty, in that there are oppressed workers and strikes and men dancing, in this case in Wales.

23. Steve Jobs ©2015 Dir. Danny Boyle who previously directed 127 Hours which I loved, and Slumdog Millionaire which I didn’t. (127 Hours is the movie about the lone hiker in Canyonlands National Park who cut off his own arm when pinned in a crevasse.) Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. Compresses the Walter Isaacson biography into 3 scenes, taking some liberties, say folks who’ve read the book. Kate Winslet is terrific as Joanna Hoffman, Jobs’ executive assistant. Michael Fassbinder plays Jobs, Seth Rogan, Woz . Jeff Daniels plays John Sculley. This movie has been described as a character assassination. Jobs’ behavior is so awful he’s fascinating. IMHO this movie does not enhance the image of Apple either, though I still respect the brand.

24. Bridge of Spies ©2015 Dir Steven Spielberg. Docudrama. Tom Hanks plays James Donovan, a private lawyer who represented Russian spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) in 1957, and then in 1962 negotiated a two for one trade done on a bridge between East and West Berlin: Abel for U2 pilot Gary Powers plus an American student caught on the wrong side of the Wall as it went up. Amy Ryan plays Hank’s wife, Alan Alda his boss. Judge Byers (Dakin Mathews) ignored fair trial protocol. There’s an epilogue.

25. Nine Lives ©2006 Written and Directed by Rodrigo Garcia. 9 separate dramas each focused on an emotional event in a woman’s life played in real time shot in one take. Why nine? Garcia said in the DVD extras he figured 90 minutes was a good length for a movie and each would take about 10 minutes. In fact the movie is 112 minutes. Marie recommended this, saying seven of the dramas were really good. I wonder which two she nixed.

26. Spotlight ©2015 Dir. Tom McCarthy. This movie is about journalism. The story the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team (Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams and Brian d’Arcy James) was investigating was the priestly child-abuse one. Also with Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci and Billy Crudup. Seen with MaryDan, Ezra and Laurel Thanksgiving weekend.

27. Trumbo ©2015 Dir Jay Roach. w/ Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood writers blacklisted in the 1950’s. Helen Mirren plays a thoroughly unsympathetic Hedda Hopper, John Goodman a sympathetic producer of trash movies. Trumbo wrote, usually under an assumed name, The Brave One, Roman Holiday, Spartacus, & Exodus after he was blacklisted.

28. Brooklyn ©2015 Dir John Crowley, adapted from Colm Toibin’s novel by Nick Hornby. Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan), a young woman with no prospects at home, emigrates to Brooklyn in 1950. We see her at her rooming house, and at her department store job, and at a parish dance. A kindly priest (Jim Broadbent) has her help in his soup kitchen, and he encourages her to go to night school, to relieve her loneliness. Tony (Emory Cohen) starts courting her. Eilis’ beloved older sister Rose dies. Eilis returns to visit her grieving mother. A nice young man with prospects in her home town starts courting her. An old biddy refocuses her loyalties.

29. In the Heart of the Sea ©2015 dir Ron Howard. w/ Chris Hemsworth as First Mate Owen Chase, of the Essex, a whaling ship that sank in 1821 after a collision with a whale. Benjamin Walker plays Capt. George Pollard Jr. who grows in moral fiber in the course of the movie. Tom Holland plays cabin boy Thomas Nickerson, Brendan Gleeson plays old Thomas Nickerson being interviewed on Nantucket in 1850 by Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw)) seeking background for Moby Dick (©1851). I loved the Nantucket scenes. Herman would’ve enjoyed this movie. The web afterwards corrected inaccuracies. I never knew there was a “Mocha Dick” legend in Chile about a monster whale that also inspired Melville’s novel. Oil wasn’t discovered in Pennsylvania until 1859, whereas it is conflated in the movie to be nine years earlier. This movie was offered in regular, iMax, 3-D, and 3-D iMax formats at Assembly Row! I saw it in iMax and think it was no better visually that other regular movies. However, at the same theater some months earlier Polly Stevens and I saw The Martian in 3-D, and I found the 3-D aspect to be a big part of my pleasure.