Amelia Earhart really is one of my icons, a formidable role model. She broke so many boundaries, so many records, always striving to move beyond, never to rest. Her sudden and tragic disappearance in July 1937 on a round the world trip has lent an enduring fascination to her story. It?s almost as if she had been transfigured, from a mortal to an immortal aviatrix. She is and will remain forever the vagabond of the air, to use her own words.
I saw Amelia recently, the biopic with Hilary Swank in the title role. The first thing that struck me was the uncanny resemblance between Swank and Amelia, and I don?t just mean the hairstyle! It?s almost as if she was born to play this part.
The reviews this movie has received, the assessment of Swank?s performance, have been less than generous to say the very least. I could not care less what the critics think; I loved this movie, and I thought Swank was superlative in the role of the tragic heroine. I think she captured not just the general deportment and the general attitude of Earhart but something more, something of her spirit.
The other performances I would like to highlight are Richard Gere as George P Putnam, the publishing tycoon and Amelia?s eventual husband, and Christopher Eccleston as Fred Noonan, the navigator also lost with Amelia on the final flight of her Lockheed Electra.
I love bio movies and this one really carried me along. I now feel sufficiently inspired that I?m considering taking flying lessons; yes, indeed I am. :-)
The title I have given this says it all: The Book of Eli is The Road by any other name. Here we are once again in a post-apocalyptic world; here we are in another bleak landscape populated by cannibals and other oddities, as the one ?just man? makes another pointless journey. Quite frankly I for one have had enough of this unremittingly bleak vision, entertainment for the age of global warming. But while The Road at least attempted to make a novel point in a novel way The Book of Eli is predictable unbelievably obvious.
Once again I?m shooting ahead. The Book of Eli is a movie directed by the Hughes brothers, staring Denzel Washington as Eli, the good, and Gary Oldman as Carnegie, who manages an effective combination of the bad and the ugly.
The good, the bad and the ugly may give you a clue. What we have here is a post-apocalyptic western with overtones of Mad Max. Eli is the man with no name for the modern age, who manages an air of justice while cutting down people in a rapid and wholesale manner.
But that?s not Eli?s secret, no; his secret is a book, ?the Book?, which he is carrying. Carnegie has a secret too; he is looking for ?the Book?; his illiterate henchmen are scouring the land looking for ?the Book? on his behalf, throwing all sorts of rubbish at his feet, including the Da Vinci Code! Why, is he looking for ?the Book?; does it contain magic spells; is it a source of power, a plumber?s manual, perhaps? Well, it depends on your point of view, but ?the Book? turns out to be the Bible, the last copy left in this desolate world. Now here we enter the territory of Indian Jones, of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where a holy object simply invests power on its possessor, no matter the character and intentions of the said possessor!
This is a silly, rambling, portentous movie with a more than usually unbelievable plot. The only thing that kept me watching, the only thing that kept me in the theatre, was the forlorn hope that if must get better - surely it must-, that and the performance of Denzel Washington, who never fails to impress, no matter how bad the script. And it is bad, as bad as they get. I just found the messianic and religious overtones repellent. If there was a message it was one that I did not warm to, could not warm to.
In the end Carnegie gets a hold of ?the Book?. He will use it to build up a following, to build up a new state based on the Word, his Word. Ah, but he can?t, you see, and I?m not going to tell you why he can?t. Go and see for yourself. If I can sit through this tripe so can you. :-)
Yes, Carnegie gets ?the Book? while Eli, mortally wounded, goes further west in the company of a girl named Solaris, played by Mila Kunis, his new disciple. They make it to a civilized and literate community based on Alcatraz, of all places. Here Eli dictates the contents of ?the Book?, which he has memorised, to Lombardi, a scribe played by Malcolm McDowell, looking as old as Methuselah. Now another secret is revealed about Eli, which I also refuse to divulge. But the biggest secret has to be what kept him alive long enough to dictate the whole Bible before shuffling off this mortal coil. The power of the Word, perhaps?
If you like rubbish served in a wholly egregious, self-righteous and preachy fashion this is your movie; it?s not mine. I?m sure it will be a big hit with the evangelicals, though.
Is it possible to love the impossible? Let me put this another way: is it possible to love someone even in the face of the most terrible truths?
My boyfriend and I went to see The Reader earlier this year. The movie is based, of course, on the novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink, which I read some years ago when I was still at school. It?s chiefly about guilt; guilt about the Holocaust and guilt about the past; about personal guilt and about national guilt. It?s an impressive book, a tour de force, which made me think deep into the issues raised, but in an entirely cerebral way. I felt a certain guilty sympathy for the character of Hanna Schmitz, but nothing more. Then I saw the movie.
Hanna Schmitz is played by Kate Winslet, a part for which she was awarded a golden globe and an Oscar, deservedly so. She brings out the human tragedy of Hanna, a woman whose struggle to hide a personal shame determines each and every choice she has made in life.
The story begins in Germany some ten years after the end of the war. Hanna, a tram conductor, meets Michael Berg, the narrator of the story, and more than twenty years her junior. Despite the age difference they begin an affair, strongly sexual in nature, but lacking in real emotional engagement. Hanna continually holds Michael at a distance, and is sometimes quite callous in her attitude towards him. But she loves to be read to, all sorts of things, from Homer to Chekov. She never reads herself, not even the menu in a restaurant. The relationship continues over the course of a summer, the reading becoming as important, if not more important, than the sex. Then Hanna disappears, leaving nothing behind.
Years later, Michael, now a law student, attends the trail of some former SS guards in the company of his professor and others in his seminar group. It?s just another exercise for him, but there, among the female defendants is Hanna. As the trail unfolds she is the only one to express just exactly what she had done, in a straightforward and altogether human fashion. She is guilty, yes, but no more than her fellow accused, who dissimulate and evade.
When the court tries to establish who is most responsible for the principle crime, allowing hundreds of Jewish women to burn to death in a church, a document is produced, a report written after the event. The other accused collectively say that Hanna was the author. She is asked to provide a specimen of her hand writing. At once she admits that she wrote the document.
This is the critical point, the point when Michael, watching from the galleries, understands the full truth; Hanna is illiterate. Everything has followed from this, even her decision to evade a promotion at Siemens and join the SS. She is the victim of her own shame. Michael, carrying his own guilt, remains silent, and Hanna goes to prison for life.
Through all these stages, and all these changes, Winslet brings out Hannah?s inner struggles, shows her as a vulnerable and tragic figure, finally living through years in prison, consoled only by tapes sent by Michael; tapes of him reading Homer and Chekov. She ages; she learns to read; she asks Michael to write to her. Nothing ever comes; only the tapes. On the verge of release, after a visit in prison from Michael, their first meeting since she left his hometown all those years before, she hangs herself.
Winslet made me understand Hannah, she made me ever more sympathetic to Hannah and, at the end, she made me love Hannah.
Yes, it is possible to love the impossible.
Amelia
PG
The Book of Eli
R
The Reader
R
