This Gaudy Gilded Stage

Tonight, PJ and I saw Invictus, Clint Eastwood‘s new film about Nelson Mandela. It stars Morgan Freeman as Mandela and Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar. The movie centers around Mandela’s use of the South African rugby team to unify his divided, post-Apartheid country. Here’s the trailer:

In sum, I’d say that I liked this movie but it probably isn’t in contention to be one of my favorite films of the year. I’ll start with what I like about it.

First and foremost, Damon is great in his role as the captain of the South African rugby team. I’m not very familiar with authentic South African accents, but Damon’s accent seemed believable to me. More importantly, it was consistent. It always drives me crazy when an actor’s dialogue comes and goes over the course of a movie (like Helen Hunt’s in As Good as It Gets).

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Over the weekend PJ and I watched Dog Tags, a movie about a guy, Nate, played by Paul Preiss, who joins the marines in order to please his girlfriend and his mother. While home from basic training, Nate gets a rude awakening about the girlfriend and meets Andy, played by Bart Fletcher, a gay guy with his own set of problems. The two men hit it off, leading both to make some important decisions about their futures.

I couldn’t find a trailer for the movie, so here’s a clip I found on YouTube. It takes place after Nate (the guy in bed) and Andy (the guy in the shower) have spent a night in a motel together.

I’m glad I found this clip because it illustrates what I like about this movie. First off, Preiss is great in this role. His Nate is a typical guy who’s just trying to do the best he can in life. His main problem is that he doesn’t know how he is. Raised by a single mother who isn’t very honest about his origins and who is torn between her hope that the marines will give him direction and that he’ll fail to become a marine, Nate pretty much just goes through life doing what everyone tells him to do. He’s not a big thinker.

Yet Preiss creates a character that is good-hearted and sincere, even if he isn’t terribly bright. As we get to know him better, however, we see that he is smart and has a lot of potential; he’s just never had the opportunity to figure things out for himself.

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Last night, PJ and I went out to see Jane Campion‘s new movie, Bright Star, which depicts the love story between the English poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne. PJ is an admirer of her work, especially The Piano, and we’ve heard lots of Oscar buzz for this film, so we were really looking forward to seeing it. We both really liked it.

Here’s the trailer:

English professors like me and PJ know of Brawne solely as the woman Keats loved but couldn’t marry. Practically penniless, Keats couldn’t afford to marry, and within a year of their meeting in 1818 Keats began to show the early signs of tuberculosis. The entire length of their romance was less than two years, and much of it was conducted by correspondence.

The fact that few facts about their relationship are known beyond the existing letters written from Keats to Brawne (he had her letters burned at his death) poses a huge problem for the filmmaker who wants to tell their story. The temptation would be to completely fictionalize the story, veering into either melodrama or romantic comedy.

What I like most about Campion’s take on this story is that she has clearly avoided the pitfalls of modern romantic films, choosing instead to work toward cinematic realism. While there are lyrical elements to her film, she attempts to present this love story as quietly and simply as possible. She includes many of the elements contained in the letters and contemporary accounts, but she never speaks down to the audience. She shows us these characters and their story without wasting a lot of time on exposition. In doing so, she creates a very affective story, which, if not completely historically accurate, creates a pair of lovers that are believable and enthralling to watch.

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Yesterday, PJ and I watched Entre Les Murs, or The Class, a French film that was nominated for Best Foreign Language film at the Oscars this year. I wasn’t going to watch it with him at first, but then I was too tried to get off the couch. I’m glad I saw it: I loved it!

Here’s the trailer:

The film’s plot is deceptively simple: novelist and teacher François Bégaudeau plays a version of himself as the film follows his class over the course of a school year. The students in the class are played by non-actors; they’re kids from Paris who helped develop the dialogue and action through improvisation workshops with the director, Laurent Cantet, and Bégaudeau.

Nothing terribly dramatic happens over the course of the film. We see the teachers and their discussions in the teachers’ lounge. We see the kids, mostly in French class but also in the school yard, a concrete playground on which they sometimes play soccer. Some kids excel in class; others get into trouble. So in this way, The Class feels more like a documentary about a relatively nondescript junior class on French grammar.

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Last night, PJ and I watched Rock Haven, a 2007 film about a nerdy Christian boy who falls in love with another boy when he and his mother move to the community of Rock Haven, California. Here’s the trailer:

The movie was written and directed by David Lewis and stars Sean Hoagland as Brady, the closeted Christian. Brady and his mother are devoutly religious, and Brady is more than a little nerdy — he loves playing trivia games and looking at the stars through his telescope, for example. But then he meets Clifford, a hot nineteen-year-old who likes to sun bathe on the beach.

Owen Alabado plays Clifford as a mixture of shyness and self-confidence. He’s spent most of his life in boarding schools. This has made him shy about his sexuality, but he’s also independent and self-assured in other areas of his life. He and Brady start hanging out together and most of the first half of the film is about the two of them falling in love, the first time for each.

These new feelings, of course, cause problems for Brady, who can’t reconcile his sexuality to his religious beliefs. Consequently, he spends most of the film getting close to Clifford and then pushing him away and then repeating this process again.

Overall, I really liked this movie. First off, the cinematography in this film is really beautiful. Christian Bruno does an excellent job capturing the beauty of the coastline, the ocean, and the two boys.

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Last night, PJ and I watched Rudo y Cursi, which reunites Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, who had previously starred together in one my favorite movies, Y tu mamá también. In this movie, they play two brothers who compete against each other for their mother’s love, for their social status in the local community, and, most importantly, in soccer. Here’s the trailer:

Garcia Bernal plays Tato, who is a talented scorer, and Luna plays Beto, a great goalie. Tato is, as his nickname suggests, also a big romantic, someone who falls in love deeply and quickly without thinking it through. He’s also passionate about  singing, which is the career he really wants. Beto is married and has several children. He’s always been the responsible brother — he’s even the foreman of a banana factory when the movie begins — except for one thing: he has a major gambling problem.

Shortly after the movie begins, the two brothers are discovered by a talent scout who wants to manage their football careers. Both brothers are older than the usual rookie, but the scout thinks he can help them anyway.

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