By Roger Moore
FILM: Nebraska
CAST: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach, Bob Odenkirk.
DIRECTION: Alexander Payne
Dylan Thomas taught us all we ever need to know about old age, death and dying: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”. Woodrow “Woody” Grant makes his rage a quest. He’s 80ish. He’s gotten a letter in the mail that tells him he “may have already won” a million bucks in a magazine sales sweepstakes. And he’s going to get from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, to collect it.
There’s no talking him out of it. His son tries.
“You haven’t won ANYTHING.”
His wife nags - “You dumb CLUCK!”
And since he’s too feeble to drive, there’s nothing for it but to give the slip to his doubting family. He’ll walk, in early winter, from Montana to Nebraska.
Alexander Payne’s bleak, brilliant and bitterly funny Nebraska begins with the image of Woody, played by Bruce Dern in a spot-on, shambling performance, trudging down a highway in wintry Billings. The cops pick him up and we meet his long-suffering stereo-salesman son, David (a terrific Will Forte).
We meet Woody’s shrill, cranky wife, Kate (June Squibb, who steals the movie). “You know what I’d do with a million dollars? I’d put him in a home!”
David agrees. But from the start of this story to the end, David and we come to realise that it’s taken a lifetime of hardship, disappointment and trauma to get Woody to this point. The director of Sideways serves up another poignant and hilarious road trip comedy, with David — freshly split from his girlfriend — indulging his dad’s lunacy by driving him to Lincoln. Not much sense in stopping at Mount Rushmore. But a side trip to Mom and Dad’s old hometown — Hawthorne, Nebraska — pays comic dividends in this forlorn farce set along America’s “You betcha” belt.
Payne, working from a Bob Nelson script, lovingly sums up the milieu of thousands of dying little rural farm towns. Woody can’t help but share his good news with an old partner, a character so sharply played by Stacy Keach that he is small-town venality summed up in one, neat, gregarious package.
The old are sticking around towns like Hawthorne because it’s all they’ve ever known, and the younger adults we meet — a generation removed from the hard work of the farm — are trapped, overweight and just self-aware enough to be bitter about it.
David discovers dimensions to his stubborn, addled dad and bullying, co-dependent mom. Bob Odenkirk plays the small-town TV reporter brother who doesn’t get to make the same internal journey David does.
And Dern, a great character actor who made his mark opposite everyone from Robert Redford and John Wayne to Jane Fonda, embraces the roll of a lifetime. He only occasionally lets us see the rascal he was through this dishevelled, troubled, reticent wreck of a man. — MCT
Predictable climax
FILM: The Bunker
CAST: Ken Shamrock, Mike Brown
DIRECTION: Joe Black
Set in the uncharted lands of The Ho Bo Woods of southern Vietnam 1965, The Bunker is described as “a story of courage and heroism”. Pvt Schenke attempts to save his fellow troops and an accused North Vietnamese army operative from a rogue Special Forces unit lead by a madman called Ranger.
Escape becomes a matter of strength, daring and brute force as Schenke and his fellow soldiers try to evade Ranger and his renegade Special Forces squad while operating out of an abandoned bunker. The death toll runs high in brutal, bloody scenes that take hand-to-hand combat to a predictable climax.
The premise isn’t bad but the way it has been executed could do a lot better. It has the looks a rushed-up job and the cast go through the motions like automatons.
DVDs courtesy: Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha
Immigration drama
FILM: The Citizen
CAST: Khaled Nabawy, Agnes Bruckner, Rizwan Manji,
DIRECTION: Sam Kadi
The bar has been raised in the “uplifting” immigration drama just enough that you’ve got to try harder and show more than “This worthy soul from Norway/ Guatemala/Vietnam/Albania went through X, Y and Z” to get to America. That tale is tired.
So The Citizen throws us this curve ball. Suppose the kindhearted, handsome foreigner who only wants the chance for a better life in America is a Muslim from Lebanon. Suppose the day he gets into the country, thanks to its then-lax “green card lottery” rules, is September 10, 2001. How might that complicate a fairly cut-and-dried storyline?
Not enough.
Egyptian star Khaled Nabawy is Ibrahim Jarrah, who tells a little white lie to the customs guy as he hopefully shows off his green card application and enters the United States. His cousin was to meet him at the airport, but doesn’t. No worries.
Within hours, he’s made a new friend — helping a lovely American woman (Agnes Bruckner) whose junkie boyfriend has gone berserk on her at the Brooklyn hotel they’ve all checked into. As awkward as that situation is, they still manage to “meet cute”.
“Lebanon, that’s Gaddafi, right?”
“That would be Libya.”
“So, you speak Persian?”
“That would be Iran.”
Diane shows him the sights, in return for his help. They make plans to hang out some more, only to wake up to a radically different world the next day, September 11. Ibrahim, who comes off as a “That can’t happen, this is America” idealist, is caught in a roundup of Middle Eastern folks who recently entered the country. That’s where his white lies got him.
But Diane keeps asking about him, despite having just met the guy and despite his decision to keep this as platonic as possible. And when he gets out, she’s there to help him find work and hunt down his American dream.
Since the first scene in The Citizen is in a courtroom where William (Die Hard) Atherton is facing off with Cary Elwes to decide Ibrahim’s fate, we know that his challenges and tests are far from over. He befriends a homeless guy, who robs him. He intervenes when skinheads mug a young Jewish guy, and winds up in the hospital.
By the time we reach the third act, which is where the trial we’ve been teased plays out, The Citizen has exhausted its supply of immigration cliches. The most moving, most chilling scenes in it are actual 9/11 footage, the clouds of ashes descending on everyone in lower Manhattan that fateful day. There’s nothing concocted by this script and the filming of it that comes close to those moments.— By Roger Moore/MCT
The birth of information war
FILM: The Fifth Estate
CAST: Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Bruhl, Laura Linney, Stanley Tucci
DIRECTION: Bill Condon
Director Bill Condon’s The Fifth Estate is a fine example of - power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely!
Based on two books by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, David Leigh and Luke Harding, this biopic documents the birth of information war and the scary heights investigative journalism has scaled between 2007 and 2010.
The film is about Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), the Australian activist who founded WikiLeaks, his ego and the web of lies he weaves to expose the corruption and “power abusiveness”. It is also about morality and integrity and discusses issues relating to “privacy for an individual and transparency for institutions”.
With the mantra, “You can change the world with great ideas, but you need people who are willing to put themselves on the line”, Assange takes on the onus to change the world.
He quotes Oscar Wilde, “Give a man a mask and he will speak the truth,” to justify his stance on founding WikiLeaks. He says to his colleague Daniel Berg (Daniel Bruhl), “find one moral man, a whistleblower and we can blow out corruption!”
Together, they start off modestly and gradually they grow with “10,000 hits per hour giving world news for free”.
Stories from WikiLeaks are picked up by the Guardian in Britain, The New York Times in the US and Der Spiegel in Germany and their releases are synchronised to have a global effect. Their exposes vary from political to financial to human rights across the globe in countries shaking governments and putting people’s life at stake for the larger good of the society.
Soon, Assange becomes a celebrity and is reckless in his disposition. Berg questions his scruples when he insists on releasing classified information on a platform that is easily accessible to public and the organisation crumbles.
On the performance front, the actors essay their roles to perfection. Cumberbatch drives home the enigmatic and elusive trait of Assange to the core and Bruhl matches Cumberbatch’s histrionics at every step. The ladies don’t have much to offer. — By Troy Ribeiro/IANS
DVD courtesy: Kings Electronics, Doha
