A must not see.

I am watching movies as much as I am able, thanks to a lovely gift from a friend, and strongly request that you do not talk Cairo Times out of our favorite video place.

It is slow, tries to be sensuous but falls short, and a disjointed story. While the filming of Cairo is beautiful the script just did not have the teeth required to ensure that the lead actors, Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig. had something to work with.

There is no need for me to go into a long review as you can simply google one, if you are so predisposed. Suffice it to say, Cairo Times was a decent attempt at movie making by script writer and director, Ruba Nadda,  but did not score a homerun.

I hope Invictus is good. It’s the second movie I’m watching tonight (a few hours off, ya!!).

‘The Blind Side’ (2009) is worthwhile. See it, with anyone including your kids.

It is a true story, directed by John Lee, about Michael Oher, an offensive lineman with the Baltimore Ravens of the NFL and his  adoptive white family in Memphis, Tennessee. 

The leading lady in this lovely film is Sandra Bullock. Bullock won an Academy Award for this part. While her acting could not be compared to academy award winner Katharine Hepburn for her role in ‘Guess Whose Coming to Dinner’ (1967), she did make the film the success it is.

I have always thought that Sandra either took light weight roles or was not a powerful actress. I think that ‘The Blind Side’ shows she has the ability to take on a somewhat meaty, almost controversial role and make it something special. For this role she also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role.

Quinton Aaron who played Michael Oher did a reasonable job. It must be something to get castled for such an important role being such a big man. He made you love him, and fortunately the role was not as predictable as one might think. I was waiting for Michael Oher to burst out into anger and tear his adoptive parent’s house to shreds, to be followed by an apology. But that never came.

He was big, loveable and peaceful.

There are so many movies out nowadays where we are witness to the end of our world. We watch as another terrorist attack is enacted or foiled and we are privy to an innocent man being blown up while caged into a bomb (Hurt Locker). These movies, I believe, reflect insecurity in our world today about our future.  Hollywood has picked up on that.

But ‘The Blind Side’ is a breath of fresh air. Finally we are able to sit down with people we love, friends, kids and watch something which is wholesome and is built upon love and caring. The story begins with sadness and slowly evolves into more and more warmth.

We watch as Michael becomes a high school football star, and then is courted by dozens of universities to play at a higher level. Eventually, as stated, he is drafted into the NFL.

Some of the critics have panned these movies and others are over-the-top about it. Of course there are those who say that ‘The Blind Side’ is nothing but a fictional portrayal of a real story about a good Christian family who lived up to every conceivable stereotype one could imagine.

While this is Hollywood and no doubt the story has been embellished, and the family is syrupy beautiful, the fact is – ‘The Blind Side’ is a true story about real goodness expressed by a white family for a black child…..an affluent family for a poor child…..a Christian family for a kid from the projects.

I cried many times while listening to the dialogue between the mother and her adopted son, words of true love and trust. I wouldn’t have cried so much if the story had not been true.

I don’t care if ‘The Blind Side’ was too Hollywood! I’m happy they made it and that it did so well.

I encourage more producers to underwrite such stories so that our world can develop more love for one another – and use cinema as a place to learn how to.

‘The Blind Side’ -  four stars. Enjoy.

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http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/movies/10soul.html

Music and Musicians Still Echo 35 Years Later

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: July 10, 2009

A partial list, in alphabetical order, of the reasons to see ³Soul Power² might go as follows: James Brown, Celia Cruz and the Fania All-Stars, B. B. King, Miriam Makeba, the Spinners and Bill Withers. A partial list, as I say, of performers captured with remarkable sonic brilliance and visual immediacy on an outdoor stage in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Congo), in 1974.

If you have any knowledge of these musicians, you will by now have stopped reading and gone off to order tickets to this extravagantly entertaining documentary, assembled by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte from a trove of hundreds of hours of footage captured by some of the world¹s finest cinéma vérité camera operators some 35 years ago.

The number of people who say they were at Woodstock has long since grown beyond any plausible estimate of attendance, and the release of ³Soul Power² may lead to a rash of unlikely, passionate claims to have been in Zaire when this monumental and now half-forgotten concert went down. It¹s not too late.

And if for some reason you think of James Brown and Bill Withers as dusty names in the annals of popular music, this movie will help you complete your education.

But beyond ‹ or rather by way of ‹ the sheer pleasure it affords, ³Soul Power² offers a vivid glimpse of a fascinating moment in musical history, racial politics and global pop culture. The Zaire ¹74 festival was originally conceived as a companion to the heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.

Just before the concert was scheduled to begin, and too late for postponement, Mr. Foreman injured his eye. The bout was pushed back six weeks, but the show went on.

Both events were recorded on film, though it took a long time for the images to see the light of day. ³When We Were Kings,² Leon Gast¹s unforgettable account of the Ali-Foreman fight, was released in 1996 and included only glancing mention of the concert. Mr. Levy-Hinte¹s film complements Mr. Gast¹s, though its approach is a little different. There are no ex post
facto talking-head interviews with witnesses and interpreters (though George Plimpton does show up drunk at a party). Instead the music and the musicians speak for themselves.

Not only them of course. Mr. Ali is there, vain, shrewd and witty as ever, cooling his heels and running his mouth, expounding on the legacies of colonialism and slavery and presenting himself, hyperbolically and in sly earnest, as a global ambassador of freedom and justice. The promoter Don King is also on hand, spinning rhetorical webs that link his own commercial
interests with the causes of liberation and self-determination.

He sometimes has a point, though Brown makes it more succinctly and with a bit more
credibility when he observes that ³you can¹t get liberated broke.²

Financed by a group of Liberian investors and authorized by the Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, a corrupt and brutal strongman with a touch of theatrical flair and unusual fashion sense, Zaire ¹74 may not stand up very well as the expression of a political cause.

But the preparations, in New York and in Kinshasa, illuminate the complexities and contradictions of organizing a modern media spectacle in a third-world country, and suggest
that some of the perks and stresses of show business are pretty much the same wherever you go.

And the music itself tells a deeper and more exalted story. Various strands of African, African-American and Caribbean musical expression collide and commingle, providing enough research material for a course in ethnomusicology.

The beats of Ms. Cruz and her salseros bounce off the rhythms of Zairean dancers, while the sounds of Memphis and Philadelphia both echo and feed the songs of Mali and South Africa.

Manu Dibango walks the streets of Kinshasa, performing a call and response with a group of children. Other children are shown doing marching exercises, which look like versions of the crisply choreographed stages moves executed by the Spinners.

At the end Brown, a musical cosmos unto himself, sums it all up and breaks it all down.

A tremendous amount of work clearly went into the Zaire ¹74 festival and into winnowing its bounty into a feature film. (I¹m hoping for a DVD boxed set that lets the viewer live through the whole three-day lollapalooza in real time.) And the intense labor of the performers is also in evidence.

You understand the effort and practice involved in making something that seems
so spontaneous, natural and free. ³Soul Power,² as aptly and succinctly titled a movie as I have ever seen, takes you to a place where the discipline that produces great popular art is indistinguishable from the ecstasy that art creates.

³Soul Power² is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some swearing and sexual references.

SOUL POWER

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte; based on an original concept by Stewart Levine; directors of photography, Paul Goldsmith, Kevin Keating, Albert Maysles and Roderick Young; edited by David Smith; produced by Mr. Levy-Hinte, David Sonenberg and Leon Gast; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes.

"Knowing" with Nicolas Cage

The following is a description of Nicolas Cage’s movie “Knowing”. This piece can be found on The Manilla Bulletin Publishing Corporation. http://www.mb.com.ph/articles/200177/nicolas-cage-stumbles-worst-truth-knowing

But First my comments….

I am posting this because I have been very, very melancholy, sad, since I went to see this movie with Dirt. It was shockingly disturbing for Dirt and me. The special affects and extraordinarily realist disaster scenes made me feel as if I was in the middle of them. Watching “Knowing” I feel as if I have seen dozens of people killed - burned alive in a plane crash, and as if I’ve seen the end of the world.

Dirt turned to me at some point and said: “We’re going to have to see another movie after this one.

What he meant was, we needed to relax after ‘Knowing’. It was too harsh and that is not the way we like our entertainment.

I know many people are fine with the flavor of ‘Knowing’ but I respond differently to films. I don’t enoy being scared (I have never attended a horror flick. Have you?) and I am not a fan of sadness, unless I need to feel it. ”Knowing” made me feel it, but I didn’t need to.

“Knowing’ touched me like no other movie ever has – but not in a good way. I cannot shake this sadness at having been privy to such realistic acts of doom. And I am anxious. The last scene was just so unsettling. 

I assume the director and actor will consider this critique a success. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is.

Through shear Hollywood commercialism I was deeply shaken. And throughout my days I continually think about the overwhelming sadness that exists in our world. Movies like “Knowing” or books and articles can do that to me. I assume most of you are the same.

I trust tomorrow will be better as there will be four days between me and “Knowing”. The last time I felt this way was after watching: Michael Douglas’s “Fatal Attraction”. I didn’t trust  women for a half a year http://www.moviesunlimited.com/musite/product.asp?sku=D28528&loc=actor

Comment: You know when you go to a movie, and three days later you say to someone, ‘I’m still thinking about that movie.’ Which movies are like that for you? 

Should you Go?

The story is fine…The acting is great….Nic is superb….. The overall sentiment? Very disturbing and sad…Entertainment? Not for me. How many Stars: 5 (It made a lasting impression on me…but not 5+)

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KNOWING

One of the most versatile actors of all time, Nicolas Cage is known to audiences around the world for his nuance dramatic and comedic portrayals and as one of Hollywood’s top action stars. His most notable film credits include “National Treasure: Book of Secrets,” “Con Air,” “Gone in 60 Seconds,” “Ghost Rider’” “Face/Off” and many more. Now, Cage takes his career to the next level as he plays the coveted role of a single father who stumbled on the worst truth that revealed the most terrifying predictions about future global disasters in the captivating sci-fi thriller, “Knowing.”

In the story, “Knowing” begins in the year 1959. As part of the dedication ceremony for a new elementary school, a group of students is asked to draw pictures of what they think the future will look like. Their drawings will be sealed into a time capsule and stored for 50 years. But one mysterious girl fills her paper with rows of apparently random numbers, which she says are being whispered to her by unseen people. Half-century later, a new generation of students examines the capsule’s contents and the girl’s cryptic message ends up in the hands of young Caleb Koestler, but it’s Caleb’s father, astrophysics professor John Koestler, who makes a startling discovery: The encoded message predicts the dates and death tolls of every major disaster of the past 50 years with pinpoint accuracy.

With spectacular special effects guaranteed to blow one’s mind, “Knowing” is one of the first feature films shot with the Red One Camera, the latest in lightweight high resolution digital technology. It co-stars Rose Byrne, Chandler Canterbury and Lara Robinson.