REVIEW

An inspiring story

 By Roger Moore

FILM: Won’t Back Down

CAST: Maggie Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, Holly Hunter, Oscar Isaac, Rosie Perez

DIRECTION: Daniel Barnz

There’s nothing more alarming to power than people organising themselves to usurp that power. Even if that power is a union, an organisation founded to protect the many from the abuses and whims of the few.

That’s the message of Won’t Back Down, an inspiring story of a working-class parent hellbent on doing right by her child, and a once-idealistic teacher who reluctantly joins her in an effort to remake their school from a chronic failure that breeds chronic failures into a place that gives its kids a fighting chance.

Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis put on an acting clinic as single mom Jamie and struggling teacher Nona, who use Pennsylvania’s school “fail-safe” law to “change the culture” at their Pittsburgh school, “expecting more” of their children, the kids’ parents and the teachers who instruct them.

Jamie (Gyllenhaal) is a bubbly working-class mom, holding down two jobs and fretting endlessly over her daughter Malia (Emily Alyn Lind, radiant), a child with learning issues and a teacher who checked out years ago. One look at teacher texting in class, the bullying kids the teacher can’t control and the principal (Bill Nunn) who barely pays lips service to her concerns has Jamie convinced Adams Elementary needs to change. Because she can’t afford private school and can’t afford to move to a better district.

She wants her daughter in Nona’s (Davis) class, where, despite bureaucracy, tradition, state requirements and union rules, Jamie spies the glint of a teacher who still cares, who remembers the crowded funeral where former students wept at the death of her own teacher-mother.

Oscar Isaac, having a break-out fall (10 Years) plays Michael, a ukulele-playing idealist who is even more reluctant than Nona to join this campaign, a guy who “just wants to teach”, who grew up seeing unions as a force for good, especially in schools.

And Holly Hunter is the union boss who understands that they’ve failed to get ahead of this idea that failing schools cannot be allowed to continue to fail simply to protect jobs, tenure and pensions. She makes the usual moves to head off this “threat” to hard-won teacher’s rights, but lets us know that she’s conflicted about her role in this “anti-Norma Rae” saga, that her heart isn’t in the tactics her boss orders her to use.

Won’t Back Down is a well-directed and edited film that gives most of its cast moments to shine and takes full advantage of the mercurial Maggie G and simmering but fiery Davis. Daniel Barnz, who also co-wrote this “inspired by a true story” with Brin Hill, goes to some pains to pay lip service to the greater complexity here. Arrogant, political and reluctant-to-act school boards, exhausted or apathetic parents who don’t want to add 20 hours of work to their week helping their kids, they all contribute to a school’s failure.

And Ned Eisenberg, playing the union chief, gets to nicely summarise the feeling that organised working people are “under assault” from anti-labour governors and their big business backers, from states like Wisconsin and institutions like the National Football League.

As complex as this simple us-against-the-odds tale tries to be, it can’t overcome the “rules” of its genre and many of the same over-generalisations of the hyped documentary “Waiting for Superman”. Oddly, these stories are never set in the failing schools of rural states where teachers and teacher’s unions have little power against the caprices of backward state and local school boards.

Still, the big moments work, the big scenes pay off and the big emotions are earned in this plucky movie about a couple of people realising that they can make a difference. - MCT

Schwarzenegger returns

 FILM: The Last Stand

CAST: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Forest Whitaker, Johnny Knoxville

DIRECTION: Kim Jee-Woon

In The Last Stand, Ahhh-nuld parties like it’s 1989. Or tries to.

This is retro Raw Deal-era Schwarzenegger, a modern-day Western with the ageing action hero as a sheriff dead set on stopping the army of an escaped drug lord (Eduardo Noriega) from helping the a dapper Latin psychopath racing a souped-up Corvette get across the border.

Sleepy little Sommerton Junction, on the Arizona-Mexico border, is where the Austrian-accented ex-narcotics cop Ray Owens (Schwarzenegger) is sheriff, presiding over a trio of inept deputies (Luis Guzman, Jaimie Alexander and Zach Gilford), keeping the peace among the locals.

A suspicious character (Peter Stormare, inexplicably doing a Scandinavian/ South Carolina drawl) tips Ray that something is up long before a local farmer’s murder confirms it.

Meanwhile, the drug lord Cortez and his minions have staged an elaborate escape from Federal custody in Las Vegas, and that has FBI agent Bannister (Forest Whitaker) in a tizzy. The bland bad guy is racing for the border. Call the sheriff - “Tell him to stay out of the way.”

Nothing doing. Better deputise, oh, the ex-Marine with the soccer star’s accent (Rodrigo Santoro) and maybe the local gun nut (Johnny Knoxville), who lends the good guys an illegal arsenal.

It’s a junky, crowd-pleasing movie of sidekicks — Guzman and Knoxville — and catch phrases. (“You make us immigrants look bad. Dis iz my home.”)

They hired Korean director Kim Jee-woon (the suspenseful I Saw the Devil) and basically stuck him with staging shootouts — a couple of OK ones — and a couple of decent car-chases, which probably owe more to stunt co-ordinator Wade Allen (Red Dawn, Drive) and the need for that Chevrolet product placement.

All for a formulaic genre movie designed to reintroduce Arnold to a new generation of action audiences. He gets to show that his years as California governor didn’t improve his acting, that he’s an “old man” still able to hold his own in the one fist fight The Last Stand demands of him.

He has his moments, though. And he gets to burnish his image in a 100-minute-long ad for the National Rifle Association, a jokey shoot-’em-up with all manner of over-armed citizenry ready and able to put down their walkers and plug a bad guy when the need arises.

Which it does, this being Arizona and with Arnold being stuck in 1989.

There are filmgoers nostalgic for this sort of fascist/gun-fetishist drivel. Not me. Give me Seven Psychopaths any day.- By Roger Moore /MCT

(DVDs courtesy: Kings Electronics, Doha)

Familiar and tedious

 By Michael Curtis Nelson 

FILM: Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection

CAST:  Sule Rimi, Sabrina Dickens, Richard Goss, Mel Stevens

DIRECTION: James Plumb

Based on the original film, Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection is set in 2012, where the deceased have risen from their graves once again with the instinct to feed on the living. As the cities are taken over and civilisation crumbles, a family takes refuge from the undead army in an isolated farmhouse in West Wales. But the greatest threat is already among them as they fight to stay alive.

In Night of the Living Dead, George Romero’s 1968 film that founded the modern zombie genre, a group of people seek refuge in a farmhouse when corpses reanimate with a hunger for human flesh. Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection follows the same basic plot.

But where Romero’s film is suspenseful, novel, and disturbing, the new film, billed as “a brand-new take on the horror classic!”, is plodding, familiar and tedious. It’s unclear what the resurrection in the title refers to. If it’s the themes and characters from the original, they would have been better left to rest in peace, given their wretched treatment at the hands of director James Plumb and company.- WS

(DVD courtesy:

Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha)