The elections are coming up soon and they have everyone talking about the big issues of today: the economy, the war, and of course, health care.
Coming up in October, we’ll be watching and discussing, SiCKO, a highly controversial documentary from 2007 directed by Michael Moore.
Moore, takes the discussion on Health Care in America to a new high (or new low, depending on your take).
As always, following the film, we’ll have a discussion. We’ll focus this time around, not just our opinion on health care, but we’ll spend equal time discussing how we have formed our opinions on health care (or any topic for that matter).
Get ready for a lively discussion. Never just watch a movie.
Be excited as next month’s film and discussion will be led by guest speaker Aarik Danielsen, writer for the Columbia Missourian. For more info about Aarik and his work, go here.
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine says this about the film:
There can be no debate about Day-Lewis. “Gargantuan” is a puny word to describe his landmark performance. Try “electrifying” or “volcanic” or anything else that sounds dangerous if you get too close. His triumph is in making us see ourselves in Plainview, no matter how much we want to turn away. Day-Lewis and Anderson — a huge talent with an uncompromising gift for language and composition — are out to batter every cliché Hollywood holds dear. There Will Be Blood hits with hurricane force. Lovers of formula and sugarcoating will hate it. Screw them. In terms of excitement, imagination and rule-busting experimentation, it’s a gusher.
Join us for another film and discussion on Friday, March 14th as we watch and discuss Sean Penn’s Into the Wild.
Here’s what one film critic, Amy Biancolli, has to say about the film:
It is not overdone; nothing in this film is overdone. Yet we realize, as we follow this tender, wounded, idealistic young man, that his voyage takes him not away from humanity but toward it. With one brutal exception, everyone he meets showers him with love: Vince Vaughn’s giddy farmer, Catherine Keener’s maternal hippie, Hal Holbrook’s soft and melancholic widower. As ever, Penn seems to direct with one hand over his heart, to feel it beating. Even the flaws in his work (most recently, 2001’s The Pledge) betray an ease with the language of suffering that can make his movies tough to watch, and not for the usual reasons. It’s the emotions that are graphic, the sorrow that draws blood.
It’s time for another edition of Movies and Mindmaps!
On Friday, January 25th, we’ll meet at 6:30 p.m. to watch The Devil Came on Horseback.
Movie Critic, Scott Foundas, says this about the film:
THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK When fresh-faced former U.S. Marine Brian Steidle traveled to Sudan in 2004, he expected to serve as an international observer to the recently announced cease fire in the troubled African country’s two-decade civil war. Instead, he found himself a witness (and ultimately a whistle-blower) to a new, even deadlier conflict just then erupting in Sudan’s Darfur region, where militias loyal to the predominately Arab government were engaged in a genocide against Darfur’s black African inhabitants. Armed only with a still camera, Steidle recorded the horrific sights that he saw, all the while the U.S. government — in an all-too-predictable case of Rwanda redux — hemmed and hawed about whether or not to intervene. Composed of grueling footage shot in the Darfur combat zone and Steidle’s plainspoken narration, directors Annie Sundeberg and Ricki Stern’s The Devil Came on Horseback offers a remarkable portrait of one man for whom “Save Darfur” became not just a slogan on a T-shirt, but a mission statement emblazoned on his soul. It is also a sickeningly effective call to action that asks how we in the most powerful nation on the planet can, even in the presence of a smoking gun, remain so loath to effect change.
This month, we’ll watch the African documentary, “Lost Boys of Sudan”. It’s a new feature-length documentary on the cultural, social, and emotional transitions of several young boys going from Sudan to the Unites States.
Film Critic Jan Stuart says this about the film:
Filmmakers Megan Mylan and Jon Shenk embody the dilemma of the African newcomer by following two of the Lost Boys, Santino Majok Schor and Peter Nyarol Dut, from the dirt-floor huts of their Kenyan village through the first year of their life in America. Among the many new behaviors the two teens must process is that they cannot hold hands affectionately as they do back home, underarm deodorant is de rigeur for socializing and job interviews, and they need to find an appropriate response to thieves who repeatedly show up brandishing guns at their housing project apartment doors.
The question simmering close to the surface of Peter and Santino’s often painful experiences crops up in most narratives about immigrants to the United States: Is the American Dream all that it’s cracked up to be? It’s certainly fraught with obstacles for a dark-skinned African male who invites stares wherever he goes and who can’t begin to compete for the affections of the white, middle-class girls in his immediate circles.
Time and again, the two young men from Sudan encounter kindly citizens who offer a smile and a helping hand but ultimately lack the empathic resources to provide an all-important sense of connectedness. “Lost Boys of Sudan” provides gripping evidence of just how costly it is to wear the shoes of an imperiled non-American who is rescued by Uncle Sam.
It’s community event. We meet once a month to watch and discuss interesting films. It’s a place where culture meets conversation. Never just watch a movie.
Movies and Mindmaps has been rescheduled. We will now be having it on Friday, the 21st. See you there!
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In September we’ll watch and discuss the 2005 film, V for Vendetta.
Here’s what film critic Roger Ebert has to say about the film:
There are ideas in this film. The most pointed is V’s belief: “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” I am not sure V has it right; surely in the ideal state governments and their people should exist happily together. Fear in either direction must lead to violence. But V has a totalitarian state to overthrow, and only a year to do it in, and we watch as he improvises a revolution. He gets little support, although Stephen Fry plays a dissident TV host who criticizes the government at his peril.
With most action thrillers based on graphic novels, we simply watch the sound and light show. “V for Vendetta,” directed by James McTeigue, almost always has something going on that is actually interesting, inviting us to decode the character and plot and apply the message where we will. There are times when you think the soundtrack should be supplying “Anarchy in the UK” by the Sex Pistols. The movie ends with a violent act that left me, as a lover of London, intensely unhappy; surely V’s enemy is human, not architectural.
It’s time for another film and discussion. This month we’ll watch Stranger Than Fiction.
Roger Ebert says this about the film:
Stranger Than Fiction is a meditation on life, art and romance, and on the kinds of responsibility we have. Such an uncommonly intelligent film does not often get made. It could have pumped up its emotion to blockbuster level, but that would be false to the premise, which requires us to enter the lives of these specific quiet, sweet, worthy people. The ending is a compromise — but it isn’t the movie’s compromise, it belongs entirely to the characters and is their decision. And that made me smile.
Hmm… Can I come?
Comment by Josh Charles — September 10, 2007 @ 11:31 am