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To submit a review for our site please visit : Movie Review Guidelines
If you purchase any of these movies at Amazon using our link, a small portion of the sale is credited to The Educational Center ~ at no additional cost to you: Amazon .
The Artist – a movie review by Cathia Friou
Written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius.
Released in 2011 by the Weinstein Company.
At its simplest, The Artist is a silent movie about silent movies. Though not completely silent throughout, it is also a story about the pain of letting go and a facilitated resurrection.
George Valetin (played by Jean Dujardin) is your basic charming narcissist who has no sense that he will ever age out of the movie star spotlight. As master of the universe with the adoration of his fans and his omnipresent (if not omniscient) dog, it appears George is unstoppable. That is, until the rise of "talkies."
Convinced that talking films are just a passing fad, George starts his own silent movie production company and occupies the starring role there as well. (It brings to mind a lawyer representing himself and having a fool for a client.) In a telling scene in which his flop of a movie has the handsome star drowning in quicksand, we sense what's coming his way off-camera.
Enter stage right, his peppy paramour, Peppy Miller (played by Berenice Bejo). Even as her star is ascending, she saves George from himself on more than one occasion and orchestrates a stellar comeback for him. Pitiless, she does this from a growth mindset that he lacks and all in the name of enduring love.
It is not so much George's struggle with letting go and the predictable fall that interests me, but his unusual resurrection. His rock bottom moment comes when he has a thwarted brush with death and the movie ends with a totally revived and reinvented man, all a la Peppy. I question whether and how much another person can facilitate our resurrection. I would have thought it a wholly personal and solo endeavor, and yet the tidy ending of the two of them (audibly) tap dancing off into a sunny future leaves me wondering...and also curiously hopeful.
Questions to consider:
What does rock bottom feel like, and is hitting it a requirement for finally letting go of an old story?
What do you know of trusting the cycle of endings?
When have you been stripped of your identity and/or a known future? How tirelessly did you seek to recover it?
When have you refused help from a loved one out of pride, pain or paralyzing fear?
Does resurrection "count" any less if facilitated by another?
How do you know when to let go of a resurrection story that isn't your own?
Take Shelter—a movie review by Kathie Collins
Written and directed by Jeff Nichols
Winner of the Cannes Film Festival's Grand Prize 2011
When storm clouds build in a film (or in life), we know something is up. Just not what, precisely where the havoc will strike, how long it might last, or how extensive the damage might be. Mother Nature's wild card, a storm is an unpredictable phenomenon whether it is meteorological, political, psychic, or some powerful combination of all these forces. We prepare as fully as possible based on the risk we can foresee, and then pray for the best. Mostly we come through okay—repair the damage and move on. The problem of course—or maybe the beauty—is that some of us are capable of foreseeing the worst possible kind of storms.
Such is the case in Take Shelter for Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon)—a working class husband and father simultaneously struggling to make ends meet and make sense of the horrific dreams and strange delusions that have begun to brew in what was once his "good life" in a small Ohio town. Conscious of a family history of schizophrenia, Curtis is unsure whether his visions of apocalyptic doom are symptoms of the disease taking hold in him, or premonitions of a real event that will tear the world apart. Neither are viewers sure.
Director Jeff Nichols steadily builds that question, allowing viewers to be sucked into the vortex of Curtis's storm-centered energy. The lulls within the film and Curtis's life, which heighten his inner turmoil and a growing apocalyptic tension, become fewer and farther between as his panic about the impending storm focuses his attention on preparation. Since Curtis doesn't know whether his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and six-year-old deaf daughter Hannah are better served by a storm shelter or his receipt of therapy, he attempts to attack his problem from both angles, all the while keeping his deepening sense of doom and panic from his family and friends. And, for a while, it seems that Curtis, a humble but bright crew chief for a sand-mining company, just might be able to hold such tension, drilling into the earth's depths by day while withstanding and adapting to the horrors that arise from the depths of his unconscious by night.
Shannon is superb in his ability to demonstrate the intricacy, paralyzing fear, and paradox of Curtis's condition. Chastain is also convincing as a wife torn between her devotion to the husband she loves but no longer understands and fear for her own and her daughter's futures. And Nichols is to be commended for combining such polished performances with equally well-polished special effects, which are at times subtle and at others quite spectacular, into a work of art that aptly conveys the sublime—a horrible beauty that can sometimes exist at the intersection of life's inner and outer weather.
Questions to consider:
What are the storms for which you spend your life preparing?
What various forces combine to form these storms?
Who or what in your history makes you sensitive to these particular storms?
Who or what must you protect from these storms?
What are the shelters you build? Who helps you to build them? How do you explain them to others? To yourself?
What life might you miss while you focus on building and taking shelter?
How are you, like Curtis, stoic in your ability to endure the wild winds alone?
Who are those you might finally trust with the terrible visions that appear as symptoms of both your inner and the world's outer weather?
Under the Same Moon (La Misma Luna) ~ a movie review by The Rev. Joseph Clark, Educational Center Board Member
Director: Patricia Riggen
Writer: Ligiah Villalobos
Starring: Eugenio Derbez, Kate del Castillo and Adrian Alonso
Release Date: 2007
Running Time: 105 minutes
Language: English / Spanish
Midnight in Paris ~ a movie review by The Rev. Courtney Davis Shoemaker*
Year of Release: 2011
Director: Woody Allen
Film Company: Sony Classics
Main Actors: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams and Kathy Bates
This romantic comedy is a wonderful ticket to Paris and much more. Gil (Owen Wilson) and Inez (Rachel McAdams) travel to Paris with Inez's wealthy parents who are there for business. Gil is working on his first novel and loves to find inspiration in all that he sees as they roam the streets of the city taking in the sights, sounds and of course, the food. Gil and Inez run into another American couple that Inez likes very much but whom Gil finds insufferable. One evening the couple invites Gil and Inez to go dancing and while Inez quickly accepts, Gil complains that he isn't feeling well. Once they go on their way, Gil decides to take a walk back to the hotel but gets lost. As he sits on some stairs to clear his mind, an antique car pulls up and some party goers invite Gil to join them. He agrees and finds himself transported back to the 1920s. Soon he is surrounded by Cole Porter (Yves Heck), Josephine Baker (Sonia Rolland), and Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Allison Pill and Tom Hiddleston).
When Gil leaves the bar he finds himself transported back to 2010 but in the evenings to come he always finds himself back on the stairs and the car will come to pick him up, taking him back to the 1920s where he meets Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) among others.
Meanwhile, Inez and her parents have no idea where Gil goes each evening. Gil attempts to live both in 2010 and in the 1920s, but it becomes increasingly difficult and hilarities ensue. The people he meets in the 1920s stimulate, excite and inspire him, and he even meets a beautiful young woman, Adriana, and begins to fall in love. But the past and the present cannot meet, and Gil grows more and more confused.
This romantic comedy is a treat for anyone who has longed for days that have passed but lives in the reality of the present.
Some Questions to Consider:
If you could travel back in time, what period would you like to visit and why?
What is it that you long for in that time period that you feel is lacking in the world today?
Do you resonate with Gil's character or another character in the film? Why or why not?
What does this film say about the past and the present?
* Courtney generously served on The Educational Center's Board of Directors from 2009-2011. She was Assistant to the Rector at St. Stephens Episcopal Church in Lynn, MA and has recently relocated to Burlington, NC.
