George Oxford Miller, Reel News, June 2014
George Miller is a member of the Society of American Travel Writers and believes that travel is a product of the heart, not the itinerary. See his webmagazine at www.travelsdujour.com.
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The Trouble With The Truth (2012)
Cast: Lea Thomson, John Shea
Genre: Drama
Rated R for vulgar language, adult themes.
Forget the formulas about romantic reunions or cosmic conversations. This is not Eat Pray Love, it’s eat, drink too much, say what burdens your heart. It’s finally got to the point where you can speak openly and honestly, without acrimony, to your ex about what went wrong. Robert (Shea), a pianist, and Emily (Thompson), a novelist, were married for 14 years and now divorced for ten. When their daughter gets engaged, they agree to meet for dinner in an intimate restaurant. The memories, expectations, confessions, and even lingering romantic sparks, flow as freely as the wine. The dialogue ranges widely, but always orbits around who the two have become and how they got there. Credit the two actors for keeping us interested in their lives and keeping the energy flowing as they deconstruct and reconstruct themselves and each other. Would that we all could be so honest with ourselves, much less with our significant others.
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Jude Law, F. Murray Abraham
Genre: Comedy
Rated R for brief violence, gore, sexual content, adult themes.
Don’t expect a serious movie here, or even a plot. It’s daffy, goofy, but never insipid. Every scene resembles a fever dream that just keeps astounding us with how clever the human imagination can be. Saturated colors, unpredictable dialogue, grandiose settings, and madcap characters stimulate every sense. Gustave H. (Fiennes) is the concierge in a hotel tucked high in the mountains of Zubrowka. Europe’s aristocrats, especially older women, flock to the retreat to be pampered, and seduced by the flippant but famous Gustave. When the entitled Madam M, a favorite of Gustave, dies, she leaves him a prized painting worth a fortune. The heirs hire a deranged assassin (Willem Dafoe), the ZZs (think Nazis) invade, theft, murder, imprisonment, and jailbreak follow, and a missing will adds complications to the shaggy-dog plot.
The Attorney (2014)
Cast: Song Kang-ho, Kim Young-Ae
Genre: Courtroom drama
Unrated
Korean with English subtitles.
Based on a 1980s case involving students falsely charged with treason by the South Korean dictatorship, this melodrama starts out with Mr. Song (Kang-ho), a shyster attorney who got rich by handling tax and real estate, despite having no law degree or license. A friend begs him to help her son who was arrested and charged for being a member of a pro-communist espionage group—a social studies book club, no less. Mr. Song discovers the students were jailed, interrogated, tortured, and the case against them fabricated by the secret police. He takes the case to court and dramatically turns the trial from a showcase of state power into a condemnation of state brutality. The action occasionally lags and some particulars lose a little relevance due to cultural differences, but the acting and the universal theme easily carry the movie.
The Missing Picture (2013)
Genre: Documentary
Unrated
Millions of people died in Cambodia under the Pol Pot dictatorship in mid-1970s. Director Rithy Panh was 13 then and saw his parents, relatives, friends herded to the death camps. Their future was stolen, but Panh is determined that their history and suffering will not be forgotten. With a bizarre collection of artifacts from the present and past, his poignant memoir tells the story of Pol Pot’s reign of terror. Panh uses clay figures to create dioramas that illustrate nightmarish events, and brings them to life with historical and contemporary footage, voiceover narration that’s more poetry than rant, and dreamlike imagery. He creates not only the missing picture, but the powerful emotions that hide beneath the collage of the present.