Movie Review: Citizenfour

Citizenfour (2014)

Five Stars out of Five

R

Edward Snowden

Glen Greenwald

William Binney

Ewan McAskill

Director: Laura Poitras

Rarely if ever have I seen a movie, a documentary in the case of the 2015 Oscar winner for documentary feature - “Citizenfour”, raise as many troubling questions as Laura Poitras’ depiction of Edward Snowden’s actions in revealing the secret eves-dropping activities of the NSA. Since the day four airliners were sent crashing by terrorists into the twin towers in New York, the Pentagon in Washington DC and a field in Pennsylvania, America has changed, and not frankly for the better. How does a free people balance their national security needs with their privacy needs? Does the loss of privacy, even freely given up, mean a loss of freedom; are privacy and freedom necessarily linked in reality or at least in the minds of a majority of the American citizenry? Is it a crime to reveal secrets as a whistle-blower, when those secrets might endanger national policy, relationships and lives, but at the same time when those secrets might also reveal actions by the government that are expressly against the constitution, the bedrock of our laws?

Laura Poitras is an American film maker living in Berlin. She is a 2012 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and is well known for a 2007 movie that explores the effects of the US occupation of Iraq in 2006: “My Country, My Country” (also an Oscar nominee). As she notes in the introduction sequence of “Citizenfour”, she moved to Berlin following her 2007 documentary as she was systematically detained every time she entered or left the US – she had been placed on the DHS “watch list”. Citizenfour is essentially a three part documentary: in part one, Poitras shows that following the 911 attacks America passed the Patriot act and began a systematic collection of telecommunications data; she introduces William Binney, the NSA agent responsible for designing the Stellar Wind project to demonstrate how the data would be collected; in part two, she films and is occasionally heard asking questions of Edward Snowden in a hotel in Hong Kong, though most of the questioning is done by Brazilian-based American reporter Glen Greenwald and London-based Ewan McAskill (both reporters for the English newspaper, The Guardian); part three shows the efforts of some Hong Kong-Based human rights lawyers and others to get Snowden out of Hong Kong and ultimately to Moscow.

The first two parts of the movie are the best, with the interview of Snowden at times riveting and at times oddly disconnected as we watch for long stretches of time Snowden react to emails or news reports of his actions. In part one; we are introduced to William Binney. He states in an open forum that he was uniquely responsible for setting up Stellar Wind. This program was set up under President George W. Bush shortly after the 9/11 attacks; it authorizes the NSA to use data mining techniques on the phone calls, emails, financial transactions and internet activity of American citizens. It set the legal stage for President Bush and later President Obama to greatly expand the activities of the NSA – the activities exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013.

In part two, Edward Snowden appears on camera and is interviewed in Hong Kong over a stretch of eight days. Greenwald and MacAskill ask him questions regarding who he is; what his duties at the NSA were; why he is revealing this information; and what he hopes will come from revealing the NSA archive data. Snowden is revealed to be an intelligent and contrary to my previous opinion, a patriotic American. He makes clear in his occasionally hesitant voice that he believes the loss of privacy Americans are experiencing under the actions of the NSA is tantamount to a loss of freedom; that their actions are the stereotypical slippery slope. The NSA starts out using the data collection technique to combat America’s enemies, but would inevitably be used to control the American people. He demonstrates how the meta-data, the timing and locations of calls or emails can be used to link individuals with whoever they come into contact with. This can be used to track and monitor every citizen’s movements, but more to the point could be used to intimidate and cow everyone, certainly citizens if not their enemies. Snowden argues that this kind of data collection is illegal, immoral, and must be stopped; if not by his actions, then by the next whistle-blower that he hopes he is inspiring with his actions.

The documentary is expertly edited and written. Poitras is able to create a completely cogent explanation of a technology that is highly technical and raises questions that are very hard to answer. Poitras’ opinion on how the questions should be answered does not differ much from Snowden, it they differ at all. It is clear that Snowden, Poitras, and Greenwald have concluded that the behavior and policies practiced at the NSA since 9/11 under Bush and Obama are illegal and pose a serious threat to American freedom. In my opinion, they do not address the conundrum of what would the result be if America were to be the only nation not to practice such data collection. The movie makes very clear that the UK, for example has a program even more aggressive in data collection that the US. Are only the UK and the US using such techniques – this beggars the imagination? China and Russia, even lowly North Korea have been repeatedly caught using the internet to steal US secrets, to damage US interests or companies, and what else? How naive would it be for America to unilaterally stop using the surveillance techniques exposed by Snowden while the rest of the world continues on unabated? Finally, I do admire Snowden’s original desire to sacrifice himself or at least his personal freedom to expose the NSA’s activities; he states repeatedly his willingness to pay for his crimes. But the irony of ironies is shown in the final part of the documentary; we see Snowden’s increasingly nervous and at times frantic attempts to evade capture, and then to end up in of all places, Putin’s Russia. To say this is ironic is a gross understatement.

At times, I admire Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glen Greenwald; I admire their determination, their sense of right and wrong, and their willingness to “fight the power”. But I keep coming back to the original question: where should the balance be between privacy/freedom and security? Even though “Citizenfour” is a movie every American should see, even though these questions need to be asked and discussed on TV and in the newspapers, I do not know the answer; I question whether anyone does. To be sure Fox News will have one answer, MSNBC, Bill Maher and Edward Snowden another. But who is right and what are the risks of making the wrong choice? For once, the push and pull of the US' two party-system of democracy gives me hope that the right answer will be found – but only because we have the freedom and (thanks to Snowden) the knowledge of the issue to discuss it.

Movie Review: "The Imitation Game"

The Imitation Game (2014)

Four and half Stars out of Five

PG-13

Alan Turing: Benedict Cumberbatch

Joan Clarke: Keira Knightly

Hugh Alexander: Matthew Goode

John Cairncross: Allen Leech

Commander Denniston: Charles Dance

Stewart Menzies: Mark Strong

Young Alan Turing: Alex Lawther

Director: Morten Tyldum

Writer: Graham Moore

Book (Alan Turing: The Enigma): Andrew Hodges

Music: Alexandre Desplat

When one talks of Artificial Intelligence, one always hears the name of Alan Turing. Prior to the 2014 movie, “The Imitation Game” and its portrayal of Turing’s contribution during WWII and his later suicide (that may have come from his public exposure as a homosexual), Turing’s question about whether we could tell the difference between machine and human intelligence is a question that has appeared in the contemporary news on multiple occasions. The issue referred to as the “imitation game” by the movie is whether or not a series of questions could be devised by a human that when applied to a machine or human intelligence would reveal their actual identity based on their answers. To date, this has not happened without some extraordinary assistance lent to the machine intelligence being tested. The movie, “The Imitation Game” uses this question of true identity as a clever metaphor for the life and mind of Alan Turing: a gay man hiding in a straight world, or as the movie would also have us believe, as a man with Asperger’s Syndrome (or something similar) trying to live in a world run people not on the Autism spectrum.

The movie as written by Graham Moore (2015 Oscar winner for best adapted screenplay) is told in three interweaving story arcs: 1927 at Turing’s public school, Sherborne; Turing’s years during the war at Bletchley Park as he worked within a cryptographic group for the English; and during a course of several months starting in 1951 as the local police investigate Turing and a robbery at his home. The writer and director (Norwegian director, Morten Tyldum in his first English-language movie) deftly interweave these three separate but linked story lines to build dramatic tension in each. Each arc is brought to its individual climax at similar points in the movie in a manner where each climax heightens and adds to the overall effect: for example, Turing’s homosexual love for his classmate, Christopher is closely followed by a scene during WWII where Turing is shown experiencing difficulties in his adult life as a gay man trying to conceal a sexual orientation that was expressly forbidden by law in the UK.

Turing’s life at Sherborne is shown by the movie to be especially harrowing. That most boys at English public schools have stories of harassment to tell has become a staple of modern fiction, but the life led by young Alan Turing (Alex Lawther) is shown in the movie to be particularly so. Fortunately for young Alan, he has a friend, Christopher. Christopher is shown to be Alan’s only friend and that Alan is especially fond of Christopher, in love with him actually. A key moment in the movie’s progress and in the evolution of young Turing is portrayed when he learns of Christopher’s death from Bovine Tuberculosis (a disease that had as many as 50,000 cases a year in 1930s England). Young Turing expertly played by Lawther struggles to contain his remorse in front of the Headmaster delivering the awful news, but also begins Turing’s lifelong struggle to not only hide his homosexuality but to hide from his membership within the human race. That is humans have feelings and relationships, but “higher beings”, the smartest boy in the class that the other boys only resent for his intelligence, that smart young boy is superior to such feelings; he has no need for them. Turing has pulled himself out of the human race. He justifies his actions at a later point in life by saying; he only works alone, because anyone else would just slow him down.

 The adult Turing is played to extreme perfection by Benedict Cumberbatch. Cumberbatch is one of those rare actors that do not seem to being wearing the clothes of their character, but rather seem to inhabit that character. That the adult Turing is a character is something of an understatement. He is first shown entering the offices of Commander Denniston (played by Game of Thrones alumnus, Charles Dance). In a great scene of clashing egos, Dance channels his best Tywin Lannister haughtiness and Cumberbatch begins to show the arrogance and disconnect from normal human interactions that will plague him throughout his adult life (at least as indicated in the movie). In the scene, Denniston initially rejects Turing’s offer to work for the commander, but Turing then drops the fact that he has deduced Denniston is working on Enigma. Since Engima, the German cryptographic coding machine is a great secret, Turing’s logic in deducing that Denniston and the facility at Bletchley Park are working on it is sufficient evidence of Turing's abilities to convince Denniston to hire Turing.

Turing is introduced to the cryptographic group working on Enigma and he then proceeds to alienate everyone on the team, and to add to the already extant displeasure Denniston feels toward Turing. These poor political/human interactions on Turing’s part ultimately lead to his complete isolation within the group. He has chosen to create from scratch (or so the movie would have us believe) a computer that will resolve the issues the group is having at solving their problems with Enigma. The problem is that each day the Germans change the cipher needed to make the Enigma machine work (the German coding machine for their telecommunications). The rest of the group is trying to manually pound their way through each day to find that cipher; Turing wants his computer to figure it out as he believes the computer will be far faster. However, the computer will be expensive as well as a significant paradigm shift, and Turing is quite incapable of using any political skills in order to build a team or to convince Denniston.  Turing finds an ally in the MI6 agent assigned to Bletchley Park, Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong). The Menzies character is a human Deus Ex Machina for the Turing character. Turing is boxed in and cannot solve the problems of his situation. But the Menzies character sees something in Turing that he likes and he does have the political skill and the actual power to get things done.  The funding is found and Denniston is told to get off Turing’s back.

Turing still needs to add to his team; one of these additions is Joan Clarke (Keira Knightly). The Clarke character is shown to be better at some of the intellectual skills so prized by the Turing character, but also quite capable as functioning as a human. Her introduction as a character is shown on the surface as one more person needing to use subterfuge in order to get through life, but also she is used as a foil to help humanize and explain Turing’s personality disorder. Her problem is one faced by women to this day: in a world run by men, how can a capable woman be allowed to participate, let alone excel at her job. Through Turing’s intervention such a subterfuge is found, and through her influence, he is shown the necessity of at least pretending to be human. Of course, it works for both in the movie: she gets to help solve the Enigma riddle, and he learns a pathway back to humanity; one where he builds the team and the machine he needs to solve Enigma.

The third story arc is the weakest from a dramatic point of view, but excellent at exploring the movie’s best theme: identity. Two policemen investigate a robbery at Turing’s home. Turing won’t cooperate and one of the policemen concludes that Turing is hiding something. This secret turns out to be that Turing is a homosexual. This is illegal in 1950’s England (indeed some 49,000 men and women were convicted of this “crime” over a fifty year period). Turing is sentenced to chemical castration. The effects on his mind and body are shown to be severe. The movies’ final scenes reveal that Turing commits suicide and strongly implies that his act of desperation came as a result of the chemical castration. While there are several historical and medical flaws with this story line, it allows a fictional opportunity for Turing to explain his history and life to the investigating policeman. This was a very clever way to show how Turing, a man described as a monster for his arrogance and indifference to conventional human behavior was a perfect analog for the machine intelligence he was so keen to test with his imitation game. That the historical Turing’s personality was not anything like the disturbed and disassociated genius played by Cumberbatch is not the point. Graham Moore’s screenplay is making an artful metaphor for humankind, and our own perhaps less distinctive personalities, and our own behavior; behavior that too often seems very unhuman.

“The Imitation Game” was nominated for eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, and Adapted Screenplay. That it won only Best Adapted Screenplay is something of a shame; I could easily see this movie winning Best Picture. It is the rare picture that won the hearts and minds of both the public and the critics. That the movie has many departures from historical fact is not or should not be an issue. Biopics are not documentaries; they often contain significant amounts of fiction, but also significant amounts of art. “The Imitation Game” may well have completely altered the personalities of Turing and Denniston, the physical attractiveness of Clarke, even the chronology of events and the significance of Turing’s contribution to the Enigma project. The real point of movies such as “The Imitation Game” is not to document Alan Turing’s life, but to draw some deeper meaning from it. And in the case of the persecution of homosexuals, of the behavior of all people (elitists and the average person alike), of the real nature of intelligence in humans, quasi-humans, and machines there is plenty in “The Imitation Game” for every interested mind. This is an excellent movie, easy to watch, and wonderful to experience.

Movie Review: Rosewater

Rosewater (2014)

Four and Stars out of Five

R

Maziar Bahari: Gael García Bernal

Rosewater: Kim Bodnia

Baba Akbar: Haluk Bilginer

Molojoon: Shohreh Aghdashloo

Director: Jon Stewart

Writer: Jon Stewart

Book (“Then They Came for Me: A family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival”): Maziar Bahari, Aimee Molloy

Cinematography: Bobby Bukowski

Music: Howard Shore

Jon Stewart is well known as the host of the Daily Show on Comedy Central. In the summer of 2013, he left the show for several months as he went to Jordan to film his screenplay adaptation of Maziar Bahari’s memoir that detailed his 2009 prison ordeal in Iran; an ordeal that lasted 118 days in solitary confinement in Evin prison. That Stewart chose to film Bahari’s story is likely partly due to the fake interview Bahari gave to the Daily Show prior to his arrest wherein he was jokingly referred to as a spy by the Daily Show’s fake reporter, Jason Jones.

Stewart displays a deft touch behind the camera with respect to how he frames his scenes as well as how he introduces various novel film techniques to tell his story. For example, early in the film Bahari details his family’s history with the Savak (or secret police) under the Shah and the history of how the CIA worked to replace the democratically elected Mohammad Mossaddegh in 1953. As Bahari narrates his family’s torture at the hands of the Shah or the coup against Mossaddegh that placed the Shah in power, images related to the narration are shown in the background of a speeding motorcycle in various storefront windows. Later in the movie, Stewart also brings in a visual display of how repeating a series of names on the internet can increase their apparent importance, and thus their presumed truthiness (to borrow a term from Stephen Colbert).

Two other technical aspects of the movie were also impressive: the score by Howard Shore and the cinematography by Bobby Bukowski. In the case of the score, it worked very effectively to set the various mood of Bahari’s as his incarceration dragged on. A sense of pending doom was created by the score on the morning that Bahari was arrested. Later as the seriousness of his situation settles on him, the score again helped to reinforce the desperate state of his affairs. In the same manner, Bukowski captures the feeling of Teheran and the surrounding countryside. This disparity of bucolic country scenes or colorful urban views compared dramatically to the stark contrast of Bahari’s cell or the lonely courtyard where he can barely sense the sunlight. And note the fact that he could only sense not see the sunlight as he was blindfolded whenever he left his cell, and in fact, often when he was left in his cell.

This last point was one of the more vicious aspects of Bahari’s imprisonment. The mental torture that was daily inflicted on him was possibly more difficult to endure than the physical torture. In Stewart’s screenplay, the government of Mahmood Ahmadinejad sought to ruin Bahari’s reputation, not to simply incarcerate him. After the 2009 election was stolen by Ahmadinejad from his popular competitor, Mir Hossein Mousavi, the planning by the Ahmadinejad government that took place a year before the election became known outside of Iran. This planning was revealed to be that the Ahmadinejad regime planned on using foreign journalists such as Bahari as alleged spies working to discredit the Ahmadinejad “election”. This bears repeating: they created this plan one year in advance of the election. Thus, Bahari was arrested following the fraudulent election of Ahmadinejad, thrown into jail and tortured into confessing his crime of spying on Iran as a foreign journalist/spy. To get such a confession, it was thought by the Iranians that mental torture would be more effective than physical. To be sure, physical torture in the form of beatings also took place, but never to the face that Bahari would display to the Iranian TV cameras that would film his “confession”.

The dramatic tension of the movie is primarily between Bahari (Gael García Bernal) and his deceased father, Baba Akbar (Haluk Bilginer). It is not clear how Baba died, but it is clear that he put up a heroic fight as a prisoner of the Savak in resisting their torture. Bahari ultimately decides that to be released from prison, to return to his wife and their newborn daughter in London is a far better choice than the ultimately pointless battle waged by his father. It raises a serious and thoughtful point: when does resistance of a single prisoner against a corrupt state truly become pointless. In Rosewater, the choice is shown to be a point that is well into the realm of human suffering, but short of death. Another dramatic scene takes place when Bahari is finally released into the arms of his mother, Molojoon (Shohreh Aghdashloo). Bahari had been told as part of his torture than no one, not his mother, not anyone cared for his imprisonment, and yet four months later, there his mother is, at the prison’s gates. It is not stated firmly that she was notified of his pending release, but it is easy to believe that she (and many others waiting for their loved ones to be released) stood by those gates on a daily basis waiting for his release.

The acting by Bernal and by Kim Bodnia as Rosewater is particularly good. I would give perhaps higher marks to Bodnia than to Bernal as Rosewater is shown to be both a human and a monster. He must satisfy the whims of his supervisor and he yet slowly comes to rely to some degree on Bahari for some aspects of his own needs. Rosewater (so named by Bahari for the cologne the Bodnia character uses) at times beats Bahari unmercifully, and at other times sits quietly as Bahari relates made up (unknown to the gullible Rosewater) stories about his various adventures into massage parlors around the world. These tasteless stories might go on a bit too long in the movie, but they relate an odd vulnerability about Rosewater, and they suggest in a perverse manner his connection to Bahari, to any human. He isn’t just a monster, but in fact is a simple man, with a wife, and his own collection of weaknesses.

In the final analysis, Rosewater is a brief examination of a nation with a long history of art, of culture, of war, of proud traditions that has been captured by a theocratic form of fascism. The Iranians had their revolution and tossed the Shah, but they substituted for him a new totalitarian regime; one that uses the same prison, the same forms of torture, and the same of goal of self-perpetuation. There is little to no freedom in Iran, but ironically there is only a false sense of the Theocratic government they so loudly espouse. They are just one more group of people under the thumb of a clique of power mongers who have no goal but to stay in power. The bottom-line on this movie is that it is partially effective on showing an American audience a little more about what the Iranian people lost in 2009, a little about the kind of torture and falseness practiced by the Imams of Iran and their tools, but not too much more. Some of the acting is good, most of the cinematography is good, and the musical score is well written to highlight the various moods of the movie. It is a very good first effort for Jon Stewart as a writer/director.

Book Review: "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

Four and Half Stars out of Five

Maya Angelou

How many people have experienced, seen, done and learned from their experiences as much as Maya Angelou? How many depression-era Black girls (raised for the most part in the rural South) have grown to an adulthood that includes on her resume the following: author, poet, modern dancer, singer, journalist, Broadway actor, coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Council and (oh yes), fry cook, prostitute, and night club dancer. Who else has had working relationships with Martin Luther King, Malcom X, the Clintons and the Obamas? Has anyone accomplished as many firsts such as the first Black woman screenplay writer with a movie that reached production or the first Black woman director of a major motion picture? And how many others have been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, for a Tony, and received the National Medal of Arts, the Lincoln Medal, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Who else has a resume like Maya Angelou?

Maya Angelou began a period of intense artistic endeavors in 1968 that was to last almost until the day of her death at age 86. After a period of mourning over the murder of MLK (on her 40^th birthday), she wrote, produced and narrated a 10 part documentary on Jazz and Blacks in America for public television. Later that same year she was challenged by her soon to be publisher (Robert Loomis at Random House) to write an autobiography; an autobiography that was written with the intention of establishing a new artistic direction for the genre. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” was her answer to Loomis and the first big step in a artistic career with few parallels. “Caged Bird” would actually fall into the sub-genre of autobiographical fiction. Angelou would for the first time establish a Black woman as the central character in a novel. She would use the first person narrative style where each time she wrote “I”, she meant “we” for the Black people of America. She would be one of the first to describe “Blackness” from within, she would do so without apology or defense, and rather than focusing on politics or feminism, she would write her autobiography as a means of self-revelation. Each chapter in her life would be written almost as short stories from her life, as episodes that help explain her life and that of Blacks in America. “Caged Bird” would the first of seven autobiographies, three books of essays, multiple books of poems, two cookbooks, seven children’s books, seven plays, fourteen screenplays, and numerous audio recordings.

Angelou begins her story by relating how she and her brother Bailey (Jr.) were sent away from their parents in California to their paternal grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. The stated reason was that her parents’ marriage was breaking up, but as she continues her story from age 3 (Bailey Jr. was 4) when they were first sent to Arkansas, it becomes increasingly clear that Maya and Bailey Jr.’s parents were far from ideal (though her later autobiographies suggest she reconciled with her mother). Her grandmother in Stamps who they came to call Momma was quite the opposite. Annie Henderson was Bailey Sr.’s mother and was one of the few people in the Stamps Arkansas area (white or Black) that came through the depression in a reasonably comfortable manner. Because she owned and operated a store, and because she was an intelligent manager, she, her crippled son Willie and her two grandchildren were able to experience some minor comforts during this otherwise difficult era in American history. In fact, she was sufficiently prosperous that she could lend money without interest to white people undergoing their own fiscal problems. Angelou is able to show in a poignant and illustrative manner that this kindness by Annie was not returned after the Depression. The local white dentist for example refused to treat Maya because she was Black, and he refused in language that was the very definition of racially offensive. Life in Stamps was at times good for young Bailey and Maya, but the overt and covert racism they experienced was a constant feature of their life.

A good example of the covert racism was displayed during a high school graduation ceremony where a local white politician (Donleavy) described the big changes coming to the local white and Black high schools: in the case of the white school, there would microscopes, new books, things designed to help them academically, while for the Black schools, Donleavy extolled the virtues of the local Black athletes.  Young Maya described it as such: “It was awful to be a Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense.” Such institutionalized insults were combined with the daily abuse such as experienced by Annie Henderson at the hands of the ignorant “powhitetrash” children who could at their leisure walk by Annie’s store and hurl insults at her – the very woman that provided a moral and financial pillar for their joint communities. There was no respect displayed by the white community, nor even any appreciation that the two races were one species. Maya summed it up early in her life by commenting: “ I could not force myself to think of them as people”.

As young Bailey and Maya grew to the age of eight and seven, they were suddenly and without explanation driven from Sparks to St. Louis to live with their mother and her boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. This change in place and culture was severely dislocating for the children. It was further compounded as the two young people had to re-assess the idyllic vision each had of their absent father and mother for the new, now visible reality. Their father was a flashy, charming rascal that worked as a dietician in the Navy and later as a doorman – but never displayed the firm control of his behavior demanded by his mother (Momma to the two children) that she required of young Bailey and Maya. And their mother, Vivian turned out to be a local beauty though trained as a nurse, made her way in life as a card dealer and ran with a very rough crowd – a crowd that included her three brothers. After living for a year with Vivian and Mr. Freeman, Maya was sexually molested and later raped by Mr. Freeman. This low point in Maya’s life is actually the highpoint, though a painful one to read within the book. Maya Angelou uses language to describe her absolute ignorance as to what was taking place to her eight year old body. Her mind was so confused, she believed she was finally getting the emotional love that she yearned for from her natural father when Mr. Freeman would hug her following her molestation. Her young mind was so lost from the reality of her situation, that when he actually raped her and caused her so much pain and physical damage that she had to be hospitalized, she still never understood that she was being violated and not loved. Later when Mr. Freeman’s guilt was exposed and he was murdered (presumably by her rough uncles), she blamed herself. She concluded her voice could kill, and she refrained from speaking for five years.

“Caged Bird” is written with such fluid prose that it can be read and enjoyed just for the language. But it contains such vivid insight into the world of the Black American during the depression that it is an excellent tool to teach about understanding on a deeply personal level how one of a different race experiences life. It can be read for the personal details of young Maya Angelou, but written within the context of the story is a history and an explanation for the Black experience in modern America. Maya Angelou gives a clear interpretation of the book’s title in her 1983 poem’s (Caged Bird) final stanza:

The caged bird sings/ with a fearful trill/ of things unknown/ but longed for still/ and his time is heard/ on the distant hill/ for the caged bird/ sings of freedom

How ironic then, that a country that prides itself on declaring its best virtue is its freedom, when over one tenth of its people is still crying out for their freedom. A freedom that goes well beyond simply saying we are free, but one where young Black men can go to the store to buy some candy and not expect to be shot by a vigilante, or a child with a toy gun won’t be killed by a local policeman, or if running won’t be shot in the back by yet another policeman, or left to die in the back of a police van. When it stops being open season on young Black men, young men guilty of nothing more than being Black, then we will have taken one step towards that freedom we so frequently proclaim that is here in America for all – when the truth of the matter is, that it here for only part of our society. Let’s take the even smaller step and at least be honest about the nature of our freedom.

Movie Review: Birdman

Birdman (2014)

Four and half Stars out of Five

R

Riggan Thomson: Michael Keaton

Sam Thomson: Emma Stone

Jake: Zach Galifianakis

Lesley Truman: Naomi Watts

Laura: Andrea Riseborough

Mike Shiner: Ed Norton

Sylvia Thomson: Amy Ryan

Tabitha: Lindsay Duncan

Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Writer: Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo

Music: Antonio Sanchez

Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki

In 2006, Hollywood was the lucky beneficiary of three imports from Mexico. Alfonso Cuarón provided us with “Children of Men”, Guillermo del Toro with “Pan’s Labryrinth”, and Alejandro González Iñárritu with “Babel” – all four star or better films. Cuarón continued the Mexican momentum with “Gravity” in 2013 and now in 2014, Iñárritu has outdone them all with “Birdman”. This powerful influence from Mexico in the form of these three directors is notable, but is there an underlying theme to their artistic efforts; is there something like the Magical Realism that infuses South Americans Gabriel Garcia Márquez (Colombia) and Isabel Allende (Chile)? If there once was a unifying feature to the three Mexican directors, Iñárritu may have abandoned it in Birdman. This movie departs from the others as it fuses influences from the Theatre, from American Cinema, from contemporary American life, and, yes even from Magical Realism. It is a bravura effort notable for its artistic merits, though possibly lacking in some of the qualities that make American movies financial successes.

Like Orson Wells’ “Citizen Kane” (1941), Iñárritu has become with his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski a master of the long panning shot. Wells was a great innovator and his opening shot to Citizen Kane as the camera pans into Kane’s castle and into and through the building is justifiably famous. Iñárritu and Lubezki have instituted very similar techniques throughout “Birdman” as they fly from the opening scene in Riggan Thomson’s (Michael Keaton) dressing room to the cramped hallways of his off-Broadway theater and out into the world inhabited by Riggan. Additionally, Iñárritu has chosen to use another film style last seen in Joe Wright’s 2013 version of “Anna Karenina”. In that movie, Wright experimented with a technique wherein each scene within the movie blended and segued right into the next scene. This lends a sense of a single shot movie as well as a complete collapse of the time sequences within the movie to match those of real life; it gives the movie the feel of live action theater. To say that shooting and acting within such constraints must be especially difficult is clear, but to do it as seamlessly as Iñárritu and Lubezki do in “Birdman” is remarkable.

To help accentuate the theme and background scenery of off-Broadway plays, Iñárritu has also borrowed from the stage many of the acting techniques used in live productions. Each of the actors within “Birdman” are either shouting or at the very least speaking at the top of their voices. This lends a sense of the stage wherein the actors must project their voices to be heard, but it also refers to the near psychotic nature of the mind that resides within Riggan Thomson. Another aspect of his mental deterioration is punctuated by the driving drum rhythms heard in the movie’s score and even more highlighted by the claustrophobic nature of the dark hallways that line his theater. He is in a tight place fiscally, mentally and emotionally. He is emotionally cut off from or has cut himself off from everyone who loves him. He is a kind of bomb waiting to go off.

Riggan’s back story is that he is a former big star celebrity from Hollywood famous for making action/comic book movies featuring a flying character named Birdman. Riggan has moved to New York to open a play he has written; he will also direct and star in this play. This is ostensibly to re-start his career. He is supported by his lawyer and friend, Jake (Zach Galifianakis), his daughter Sam (Emma Stone), his girlfriend and fellow actor Laura (Andrea Riseborough), and yet one more actress Leslie (Naomi Watts). As he enters the final preparations for his play, he must find a new actor to replace one injured on stage. Leslie suggests her former boyfriend and Broadway phenomena Mike (Ed Norton). Mike joins the cast as the play moves through its three final warm up productions before the official opening. Mike is a brilliant but eccentric actor that brings more problems to the already troubled production. Meanwhile, Riggan’s mental condition is shown to be in a deteriorating situation. He talks to his imaginary alter ego Birdman. Despite being imaginary, Birdman being the comic hero argues against the artsy play and demands a return to Hollywood with its action-themed movies; that Birdman is actually Riggan’s lack of self-confidence made manifest is clear. It is also revealed that Riggan’s daughter is a former drug addict who suffered an unhappy childhood as a result of Riggan’s absences.

Iñárritu blends several themes into the movie. To help accent Riggan’s mental state he is shown to display the ability to levitate and use telekinesis while he is alone – always alone. Such abilities can be a kind of Magical Realism, but are really not so in the context of this movie, they are more a symptom of Riggan’s growing delusion. Even though he is widely recognized on the streets of New York for his Birdman role, Riggan seeks a rebirth via an artistic effort. He wants to be recognized as an actor. He thinks not being recognized as an artist, as anyone other than Birdman is the source of his problems. To make this point quite clear, he has an argument with an arrogant but influential theater critic, Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan). She forcefully explains to him that he is a celebrity and not an actor, and that she intends to pan his play so fiercely that it will close very quickly. Riggan comes back just as forcefully that she is no artist either, but simply someone that labels true artists; she is someone that cannot do, but can merely comment. Iñárritu’s comparison of art and celebrity, and even more effectively of the techniques of fantasy in a fictional life versus mental illness are two examples of the high level of art as practiced by him within this film.

Michael Keaton has like Iñárritu achieved a pinnacle in his own career within this movie. His acting life prior to "Birdman" was entertaining, but hardly of the serious artistic heights he demonstrates in this movie. Keaton smoothly moves from one mood to another, even from one personality to another multiple times during the course of the movie. He is morosely arguing with his Birdman legacy wishing for more, he is angrily arguing with a critic or destroying his dressing room, he is broadly smiling following some minor victory, or ultimately he is inwardly facing his reality while reassuring his daughter. Virtually every scene Keaton acts in, he aces with the perfection of the Broadway actor, his character Riggan yearns to be. That Keaton won the 2015 Oscar for Best Actor is no surprise, and an event that gives me some hope for the integrity of the Oscar nomination process. The movie is replete with excellent acting: Norton as Mike and Stone as Sam are two other standouts.

There are some problems within the movie. The three adult women that surround Riggan are so nearly interchangeable in terms of their near identically transparent personalities it is sometimes hard to tell them apart except by hair color or context. We can tell Sylvia is his ex-wife from their conversation, but the role of Sylvia is so truncated and her personality so absent within the story she is easily mixed up with the other blonde, Leslie. Leslie’s personality and that of Laura are nearly invisible. You can tell them apart by hair color but not by much else. To make matters even more obscure, Laura initiates a love scene with Leslie for no obvious reason in terms of the movie or their characters. The motivations and behaviors of these three female characters remain throughout the move quite a mystery. If they are in the movie to symbolize how invisible all the women in Riggan’s life are or have been to him, then that is a valid point; it is just not a point clearly made in the movie.

The much better defined character of Sam also has problems. She is yet another female left on the side of Riggan’s life due to the exigencies of his career in Hollywood. The problem with her character as shown in the movie is that her character is constantly changing. When she first appears in the movie, she is buying flowers for Riggan in her role as his personal assistant (the implications of this are clear – she is an assistant, not a loved daughter). Her affect is one of constant anger and agitation. As the movie progresses, so does her personality: angry to nihilistic to sympathetic to her father’s needs and situation to loving, even adoring of who her father is revealed to be. Such changes could occur in anyone, and indeed as Sam came to know her father and his personal demons better, this would have been a reasonable progression. But to have her change so in only a matter of days seems less than realistic. Emma Stone's acting for these various mood and attitude changes is spot on, but the character herself is problematic.

The sub-title to Birdman is “Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance”. It is referenced as a quote in the movie attributed to the theater critic, Tabitha. She uses it as a back handed compliment to Riggan following his play’s opening night. Her meaning is that despite not being a true artist, Riggan has nevertheless pulled off an unexpected coup with his play. Surely a second meaning could be a sly reference to Riggan’s personal life. He lived his career not his family life; as such he lost his wife Sylvia and is losing or has already lost his daughter. Too late he realizes these losses in a discussion with Sam late in the movie. This scene is there to justify Sam’s warming attitude towards Riggan as her father. And it does also seem to be a reference to how many people live their lives. Maybe reaching for stardom and its pointless celebrity or in the case of the average Joe working long hours to pay the rent and buy the food; but in the end losing what truly matters, the love of those you were trying to nurture and protect. Like the shallow Birdman character that lives in Riggan’s mind, bad choices are made, and Riggan/Birdman just wants to fly away from his problems and himself.

The movie ends with a scene of Sam looking out the window. This scene is both ambiguous and clever. On the one hand, the movie has portrayed Riggan’s mental unravelling in a manner that strongly suggests his levitation, telekinesis and Birdman conversations exist only in his mind. Everyone else in the movie lives with their feet firmly planted in the world we all live in. These people may be theater people, shouting out their lines or like Mike adhering to some extreme views on method acting (even as he hides his personal inadequacies, symbolized by his E.D.). But none of them could fly or hurl objects with the force of their minds. Such events were presented solely as examples of Riggan’s psychosis. And then at the movie’s end, we see Sam look out and down through a window, looking for her father. She does not seem to seem him on the ground, but then smiles as she looks skyward. Has Magical Realism now spread into the movie; is Riggan flying? Or has she seen him lying on the ground and then turned her eyes heavenward with assumption that her father is now finally happy? If the former, I really don’t see the point of the movie, but if the latter, that is has Sam and her father finally reconciled, then the movie has made its point. Riggan has regained the one thing that mattered; it wasn’t his fame, his psychotic belief in his ability to fly, his escape from his bills and harsh critics, it was the love of the one person whose love he must have.

This movie is a powerful one made by an artist who is at the top of his game. But the driving musical score, the cramped scenes, the extreme characters like Mike, will make this movie a hard one to please many movie goers. If you like exceptional acting, clever cinematic techniques, and want to see a complex story told in a complex manner, then “Birdman” may be for you.

Book Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven (2014)

Four Stars out of Five

Emily St. John Mandel

Ionesco published a play in 1961 about conformity and mass movements, “Rhinoceros”. In his play set in a small town in France, the town drunkard, Berenger watches in amazement and disgust as his fellow townspeople transform into Rhinoceroses. Berenger has multiple arguments with his friends prior to each transforming. His friends make the argument that Humanism is dead and is time for the Rhino. Ionesco was making an argument about conformity, but I heard a different argument: that many people, frustrated and confused by modern life would choose a simpler life if they could. I think that at the root of the current wave of apocalyptic movies and books such as “The Walking Dead”, “The Last Ship”, “Road Warrior”, “The Hunger Games”, etc. (the list is endless), there is a subtext that argues for a return to a pre-industrial world. A world where the average person understands the most advanced technology around him (e.g. fixing a wooden fence). But what would really be lost in some kind of apocalyptic end to civilization? In Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 book, “Station Eleven”, we get one aspect of such losses.

“Station Eleven” begins with Arthur Leander acting the role of King Lear in a Toronto theater.  During his performance we are introduced to eight year old Kirsten Raymonde, a child actress in the play with Arthur. Arthur suffers a heart attack during the play, and shortly thereafter the world is plunged (quite literally) into darkness as a bad case of influenza sickens and kills over 99% of humanity. The book jumps forward twenty years where re-meet Kirsten, now a young woman – a very hardened young woman. She remains an actress (as well as fierce warrior) in a band of artists called the Travelling Symphony. This symphony is a mixture of Shakespearean actors and musicians. They move along the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan within former automobiles drawn by horses. They encounter a rough crowd in a small village known as St. Deborah’s by the Water. The townspeople are led by an individual known as the Prophet. Fleeing St. Deborah’s by the Water, the symphony heads towards a former airport in Severn City.

Mandel does a very skillful job of moving back and forward in time from the early days of Arthur’s acting career, through his three marriages, to his King Lear performance in Toronto, and finally to various time frames in the post-flu era. In the process of doing so, Mandel weaves several themes from Shakespeare’s time of plague, elements from King Lear and more importantly to a graphic novel written and illustrated by Arthur’s first wife, Miranda. The graphic novel is the source of the book’s title of “Station Eleven”. Within this graphic novel, there is a futuristic view of the world as seen through the eyes of the novel’s protagonist, Dr. Eleven. He governs a mobile worldlet (Station Eleven) that has suffered its own apocalypse. His decisions and worldview have condemned the other inhabitants to a life away from Earth and as it develops a world beneath the waves on their moon-sized satellite. The people that live beneath the water (unlike Dr. Eleven who lives on one of the few islands) strain and rebel at their situation.

The intended parallels of Station Eleven’s Undersea denizens and those of the post-flu world where Kirstin lives are not hard to find. Like my allusion above, the people of Undersea want only to go back to what they once had. Even though they fled the Earth due to an alien invasion, and even though to return to Earth would require untold sacrifices, they will accept those sacrifices, if only they can return to the home they once knew. In Kirsten’s world, many of the villages she and the Travelling Symphony pass through, also have made this choice. They will not tell the new generation of the things they once had (cell phones, etc.), but rather they have chosen in this new (old) world of no technology, no medicine, no nations, and no vision of the future; only instead a vision of the present, which actually is a view to the past.

There are exceptions in Kirsten’s world, and Severn City Airport is one such exception. Here is a Museum of Civilization. This museum is a collection of those very same cell phones, PCs, high heel shoes and so forth. Indeed, right outside the museum’s walls is a collection of the jet airplanes that flew into the airport even as civilization was crumbling. In an oft-used technique by Mandel of coincidence, the Museum is run by Arthur’s best friend, Clark. There are many other coincidences throughout the book, some of which are used to create a few dramatic mysteries. None of the mysteries are very (or even a little hard) to penetrate by the reader. They add little to the story, but they are minor distractions. What does add to the story is Mandel’s use of an extremely nostalgic recitation of the Things We Have Lost. Rarely have I read or viewed a story wherein the various artifacts of modern life that would be lost during a civilization-ending event have been discussed in a more poignant manner. There is little poignancy otherwise within this book, but the almost Ray Bradburian fashion that Mandel uses to describe a loss of the future (in stark contrast to those mourning the loss of the past) is the book’s most notable feature.

There are parallels to the story’s impact on human life that mirror the impact of the Black Plague on Shakespeare’s time. Like the mordant tone of King Lear, the human suffering, its’ sense of regret and madness, Kirsten’s world has its share of those that regret the loss of the future and those that choose madness as an escape. Thus both Shakespeare’s world and his play offer examples of life in Kirsten’s world; in the same manner, the “fiction” within Kirsten’s world of the graphic novel acts rather like King Lear – that is the reality of Kirsten’s world and the fiction of Station Eleven all line up. There is suffering, there is regret, and there is a sense of world’s end. The big difference is that in Shakespeare’s time, you could kill off two-thirds of Europe and not destroy civilization. Whereas, in Kirsten’s (and our) world, if you kill off a sufficient number of people, the people that provide the knowledge and experience of a highly technological civilization, then you lose that civilization. You lose it so bad, it may be unrecoverable. That Mandel gives a glimmer of hope at the book’s end, suggests she may of two minds on the subject of technological civilizations.

But I think her main point is embodied in the epigram at the book’s ending (see below). It seems clear to me that she is suggesting that she too votes for the past. I vote for the future, for medicine, for cell phones and jet airplanes, and for a sense that the future is better, not worse than the past. More complicated, yes, but better, and for me that is the key. Despite my opposing worldview, Mandel’s book is one worth reading; if only to get an opposing point of view.

The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness

And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,

And for me, now as then, it is too much.

There is too much world.

-Czeslaw Milosz

The Separate Notebooks

Movie Review: "The Theory of Everything"

The Theory of Everything (2014)

Two and half Stars out of Five

PG13

Stephen Hawking: Eddie Redmayne

Jane Hawking: Felicity Jones

Director: James Marsh

Writer: Anthony McCarten, Jane Hawking

Music: Jóhann Jóhannson

Stephen Hawking is widely regarded amongst the world’s lay public as a modern-day Albert Einstein, while amongst his peers, his reputation is more nuanced. He is perhaps best known for his description of a method whereby a black hole cannot only emit radiation (now termed Hawking radiation), but in the process of doing so can actually cause the black hole in question to slowly “evaporate”. Amongst the lay public, he is also well known for his book, “A Brief History of Time” (1988). One of his many significant contributions that he has made to science is the work he started in his Ph.D. dissertation, and that was a mathematical explanation for a singularity at the beginning of time. There has been considerable work since his dissertation on this topic by Hawking and others, but the implications that grew from this work and the nature of God are important philosophical points that have played a role in his life and in the movie, “The Theory of Everything”.

“The Theory of Everything” is a movie adapted from a book by Hawking’s first wife, Jane Hawking. She shares writing credit for the movie with Anthony McCarten. McCarten was nominated for an Oscar, which to my mind is an astonishingly bad choice. The movie is an uninspired and pedestrian biopic on the months leading up to Hawking’s marriage to Jane Hawking nee Wilde, their 30 year marriage and its ultimate dissolution. The movie avoids delving any deeper into their emotional lives than skin deep. The trials and difficulties experienced by Jane as she struggles to raise their three children, finish her own work towards a Ph.D., or her reaction to Hawking’s roving eye for other women is likewise barely displayed. The biggest missed opportunity is the contrast that might have been shown between Jane’s life as a devout member of the Church of England and her career aspirations into medieval Spanish poetry versus Hawking’s atheistic and scientific world views.

The movie begins with Hawking in the early stage of his graduate work in cosmology at Cambridge. He is played by Eddie Redmayne as a fairly typical young man moving through life within a small circle of fellow graduate students. The movie makes clear early on that Hawking is a gifted student, working at a level above that of his contemporaries. He meets a young woman at a party, Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones) and despite their quickly apparent differences on religion and career choices, the attraction as portrayed by Redmayne and Jones is readily apparent. This early part of the movie is charming and is marred only by the frequent use by director James Marsh of a series of over-saturated color choices. (There are repeated scenes of nearly phosphorescent greens surrounding Hawking, of browns around Jane, and of yellows and golds surrounding several flashback scenes.) What Marsh has in mind for these color choices is completely lost on me. If he is trying to use color the way most directors use musical scores to subtly acknowledge a character, he needs to re-read the definition of “subtle”. There are times when it appears as if Marsh is trying to show a distorted view of the world as seen by Hawking. But he uses this technique very inconsistently early in the movie (sometimes to a very jarring effect) and then he drops it completely once Hawking’s illness becomes manifest. Its use is simply sloppy.

As Hawking enters into the early stages of his graduate student stay at Cambridge, he starts to display a series of physical problems. He stumbles; he knocks over coffee cups; he cannot easily use a pen. He is eventually diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more well known in the United States as Lou Gehrigs disease, or in the UK (and in the movie) as motor neurone disorder. This poorly understood disease usually strikes late in life and usually results in a death within two to three years. In Hawking’s case, it struck early, but he has far exceeded the norm for survival (he is still alive at 73, nearly fifty years after his diagnosis). Hawking wants to withdraw from life, but Jane won’t have it. She pulls him back and they marry quickly. They ultimately have three children. Their life together seems difficult but still good, initially. Time and career demands do cause strains. The movie hints at extramarital relationships for both Hawking and Jane.

Redmayne’s performance as Hawking is markedly good. His award of the 2015 Oscar for Best Actor could well have been earned. Watching Redmayne signal his emotions to Jane and to the audience as his motor skills slowly disappear is almost always nuanced and skillful. Felicity Jones’ portrayal of Jane’s wider range of emotions as she feels she is losing him at the beginning and at the end of their relationship is heart rending. The acting by both actors brings the only joy to this movie that I experienced. They both surely were honestly awarded their Oscar nominations, though the Oscar committee’s well documented history of awarding Oscars to portrayals of characters suffering some disease or other does cause me to wonder a little at Redmayne’s victory.

In the final analysis though, “The Theory of Everything” is a movie easily skipped. To be sure, there is good acting, but the Oscar nominations for “Best Picture”, “Best Score”, and most egregiously, “Best Adapted Screenplay” are serious miscarriages. This movie is somewhat like Hawking himself in the sense that Hawking has been criticized by some of his contemporaries for receiving accolades partly due to his disability. In the movie’s case, the movie has quite likely received some accolades due to its depiction of a severely handicapped individual and not due to its artistic merits. Fine acting, yes; anything more, a decided no in my opinion.

Movie Review: Into the Woods

Into the Woods (2014)

Three Stars out of Five

PG

Cinderella: Anna Kendrick

Baker: James Corden

Baker’s Wife: Emily Blunt

Witch: Meryl Streep

Director: Rob Marshall

Writer: James Lapine

Writer (musical): James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Into the Woods” reached Broadway in 1987; while there it won three Tony awards, including Best Score. Several attempts were made to convert it into a movie in the 90’s, and Disney finally finished the job in 2014. Just like the musical, the movie version included James Lapine as the writer and many of the original songs by Sondheim. It had Rob Marshall who has the movie version of Chicago on his resume, and it had Meryl Streep breaking her own rule of not playing a witch, playing a witch. So, despite being nominated for three Oscars, what went wrong?

For me, the movie is a string of pearls separated by many onions – they may be pearl onions, but they’re still onions. The first reel of the movie opens charmingly enough. We are introduced to a childless couple of Bakers (James Corden and Emily Blunt), their witch of a neighbor (Meryl Streep), Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Jack of the Beanstalk fame (Daniel Huttlestone), and Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford). They each have an agenda to work through: the Bakers want a child, the Witch wants her youth back, Jack and his mom (Tracy Ullman) need money, and Little Red Riding Hood is evidently hungry. There is undoubted cleverness at weaving the Grimm Brothers' version of each tale into a unified story, and indeed, the first part of the movie does a very good job of creating an interesting narrative. But then, following anti-climax after anti-climax, the movie just kind of peters out after a couple of hours. There are some serious overall story arc issues with this movie.

While the acting and story-telling in the first part of the movie are interesting and cogent, the singing (for the most part) and the lyrics in the early part of the movie were tiresome and not melodic. It was as if someone were singing the words from a movie that was not a musical, and not singing them at all well – I’m looking at you Wolf/Johnny Depp. Of the pearls in this movie, the duet by the two princes (Chris Pine as Cinderella’s dreamboat and Billy Magnussen as Rapunzel’s) did a great job in their song, “Agony”. It was actually a song that was melodious and sardonic. Another great song was the very short one by Cinderella’s mother/tree Johanna Riding, who easily had the best voice in the ensemble. The final song, “Children Will Listen” may have had a confusing message, but it was surely pleasant to listen to.

Acting was at a very decent level with James Corden as the Baker, and most particularly with Emily Blunt as his wife and Meryl Streep as the Witch. The high point of the movie was the witch’s initial entrance into the home of the Bakers. Meryl Streep’s eye-rolling, not quite over the top performance in these very early scenes really captured a sense of comedic acting and summarized brilliantly why the first reel of the movie was the best. Anna Kendrick’s performance as a very irresolute Cinderella was also noteworthy; especially the scene of the Balls’ third night and her third fleeing from the Prince as she finds herself caught in tar and in a moment of time. This kind of clever little aside moment for Cinderella was something that would have benefited the movie had there been more such clever scenes.

What you see for the most part are mistakes like a badly miscast Little Red Riding Hood and associated Wolf. Both characters are written very broadly as sly, wink-wink kind of characters. But neither Lilla Crawford nor Johnny Depp comes anywhere close to infusing their performance with anything but a very superficial resemblance to comedic irony. The oddly typecast Giantess (Frances De La Tour – see the Harry Potter series in order to see her play another Giantess) is a character that does not do anything but mindlessly scream for Jack and then proceed to stomp around. These characters and their scenes not only do not add to the movie, but frankly detract from it.

Is there any message in “Into the Woods”? The odd lyrics in the final song suggest a movie theme but then don't stick to it any consistent manner. In a another song near the end of the movie there might be Sondheim’s and Lapine’s message: “No One Is Alone”. This song is a reasonably decent song to listen to, and the message is certainly a fine one; a message that has special resonance in a post-911 America. Another message is to be found on the movie's poster, "Be Careful of What You Wish For": each of the major characters find out that getting their wish isn't always a good thing - Cinderella finds out what a cad the Prince is, Rapunzel is really not that sure she wants to leave her tower, the Baker’s wife believes she loves and wants her husband, but a little fling in the woods in the Prince is fine too – at least until the Giantess makes her pay for her indiscretion, Little Red Riding really should stick to the path, etc., etc. - mostly minor messages, minor songs, minor performances. As always, Meryl Streep pleases beyond what just about what anyone else can come close to doing. And for me, there were some little surprises like Cinderella on the staircase that make the movie watchable; but again, overall the movie just seemed to go nowhere, and to take a while to get there.