MOVIE- Hidden Figures

PG (2:07)

Wide release 1/6/17

Viewed Sunday, 1/15/17 at Carlisle 8 with Ella
IMBd:  

RT Critic: 93   Audience:  94
Critic's Consensus:  In heartwarming, crowd-pleasing fashion, Hidden Figures celebrates overlooked -- and crucial -- contributions from a pivotal moment in American history.

Cag:  6/Awesome  

Directed by Ted Melfi

20th Century Fox

Based on a real story

Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Kevin Costner, Jim Parsons, Kirsten Dunst

My comments: I love these "based on a true story" movies, but this one was particularly poignant, well told, and well acted.  Powerful story!  It's also good to be reminded that as recently as the 1960's, people with a skin color other than white couldn't use the same bathrooms, drink from the same fountains or percolators, find any sort of comparable job, and were treated with such incredible disrespect. Brilliant women who, if this story is truthful, truly helped make the space program of the 1960s literally get off the ground.  A fantastic movie.

RT/ IMDb Summary:  The incredible untold story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson - brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, a stunning achievement that restored the nation's confidence, turned around the Space Race, and galvanized the world. The visionary trio crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to dream big.

41. In the Kingdom of Men - Kim Barnes

2012, Alfred A. Knopf

324 pgs.

Written for adults

Finished 9/16/2013

Genre: Historical Fiction/1967

Goodreads Rating: 3.44

My Rating:  Liked it (3.5)

TPPL

Setting: rural Oklahoma but mainly the American Aramco company housing and desert surrounding it in Saudi Arabia (simply called "Arabia" in the book) in 1967

1^st sentence from the prologue: "Here is the first thing you need to know about me: I'm a barefoot girl from red-dirt Oklahoma, and all the marble floors in the world will never change that."

1st sentence from Chapter 1:  "In the beginning  --- these three words my daily bread, recited at the kitchen table in our shack in Shawnee, the bible open in front of me.":

My comments:  I have ups and downs with my reactions to this book. I loved the setting - a mysterious one, for me. Arabia in the 1960's, in the American-based housing commune - certainly nothing I had any prior knowledge about.  The Bedouin.  The animosity.  The "kingdom of men"......  And I was unprepared for the ending, a feeling that left me pleasantly surprised, because it was unexpected and perfect for the story.

Goodreads Review:   1967. Gin Mitchell knows a better life awaits her when she marries hometown hero Mason McPhee. Raised in a two-room shack by her Oklahoma grandfather, a strict Methodist minister, Gin never believed that someone like Mason, a handsome college boy, the pride of Shawnee, would look her way. And nothing can prepare her for the world she and Mason step into when he takes a job with the Arabian American Oil company in Saudi Arabia. In the gated compound of Abqaiq, Gin and Mason are given a home with marble floors, a houseboy to cook their meals, and a gardener to tend the sandy patch out back. Even among the veiled women and strict laws of shariah, Gin’s life has become the stuff of fairy tales. She buys her first swimsuit, she pierces her ears, and Mason gives her a glittering diamond ring. But when a young Bedouin woman is found dead, washed up on the shores of the Persian Gulf, Gin’s world closes in around her, and the one person she trusts is nowhere to be found. 

   Set against the gorgeously etched landscape of a country on the cusp of enormous change, In the Kingdom of Men abounds with sandstorms and locust swarms, shrimp peddlers, pearl divers, and Bedouin caravans—a luminous portrait of life in the desert. 

MOVIE: Moonrise Kingdom

Quirky.  Deadpan.  Funny.  In that order.
PG-13 (1:34)
Released 5/25/2012
Watched at El Con, hot Sunday afternoon 7/8/12, full house
RT Crit: 94 RT Audience:  92
Director:  Wes Anderson
Focus Features

Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, a small part with Harvey Keitel (!)

Setting:  a small island off the coast of New England circa 1965

Edward Norton is the leader of a small troop of "Khaki Scouts" who discovers one of his charges has run away. Sam has gone to meet Suzy, a fellow 12-year-old he had written to since the previous summer.  They are in love.  They take off together to camp on a remote part of the island.  However, a huge hurricane is brewing. The story goes back and forth from the island police chief (Bruce Willis) who has some sort of affair/relationship going with Suzy's mother (Frances McDormand), Suzy's home where her three brothers and father (Bill Murray) live their own weird lives, the Khaki scouts and their leader, all looking for the runaways.  The entire movie is tongue-in-cheek, deadpan, and very funny.  Odd and weird, yes, but different and a lot of fun.  Some of the audience even clapped at the end of the movie! (I didn't like it quite THAT much, myself...) It was a fun flick to see on a hot summer afternoon, and I love watching Bill Murray doing ANYTHING.... The Suzy and Sam actors were really great.

MOVIE - The Help

Wish I'd read the book - the movie was very good.
Wide release 8-10-11
PG-13 (2:17)
Aug. 16, 2011 at ElCon with Sheila
2nd viewing January 14, 2012 at Crossroads with Dede
RT:  74% cag: 87%
DreamWorks Studios
Director:  Tate Taylor

Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Sissy Spacek, Allison Janney

My favorite character:  Minny, played brilliantly by Octavia Spencer.  Emma Stone plays Skeeter, just returning home to Jackson, Mississippi in 1962/1963, with a degree from Ole Miss in journalism.  She gets a job writing the cleaning help column in the Jackson newspaper.  She knows nothing about her subject, so interviews a friend's reluctant black maid, Aibilene (Davis).  The black maids of Jackson raise all the white children and are not even allowed to use the bathroom of the houses they clean and cook and raise the children in.  The white women play bridge and belittle them.  All except Skeeter, who decides to try to write a book from their perspective about their plight.  It's not easy.  All the women are scared to tell any of the white family's secrets, afraid of losing their jobs and afraid of retaliation.

Hilly is the viscious young white homemaker that harrassess the maids and demolishes Celia, the "white trash" bride of her former boyfriend, Johnny.  Some of my favorite parts of the movie were the scenes with Celia and Minny, Hilly's former maid.  Octavia Spencer (Minny) was just wonderful!

Throughout the movie I got outraged again and again at the inhumanity, the insensitivity, the absolute ridiculousness of racism.  I just cannot imagine where it comes from and how some whites could (and can) possibly feel the way they do. 

It was a period piece, and the set was wonderful.  The cars (one Corvette, in particular, was breathtaking), the clothing and hairstyles, the home furnishings, Everyone I've spoken to that have read the book (and there have been many), simply loved it.  Everyone encouraged me to read the book before seeing the movie, but I didn't have the opportunity.  I still want to read the book.  I wonder how different the book and movie are?

18. One Crazy Summer - Rita Williams-Garcia

for: ages 9-12/middle grades
Amistad/Harper Collins, 2010
$15.99
218 pages
Rating: 3.5

It's the summer of 1968 and Delphine and her two younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, are going to spend it in Oakland California with the mother that abandoned them seven years before. We join them on their flight from New York, where they've left Pa and his mother, Big Ma, who have raised them. They have no idea what to expect. And neither do we!

Told in the first person by Delphine, we see the world through her eyes. She's in charge of her sisters, and there's a definite "pecking" order. They squabble. They love each other fiercely. They communicate without words. And Delphine takes care of them unlike your usual 11 year-old might. Because she has to take care of them - their mother barely speaks to them and has them fending for themselves, for the most part. They are sent to a local day camp run by the Black Panthers. Power to the people. And so the summer unfolds.

The setting is superb - the bay area of California during the summer of 1968. The characters are, for the most part, well drawn. There's a bit of insight into the Black Panther movement and what it might have been like to be black in the 60's. Delphine talks a lot about this - with the freedom - and the inside knowledge - that non-blacks could never know. It gave me a taste. A good taste. It was a good story. A great piece of historical fiction. But I'll never understand the mother. Never. I might understand what may have made her WANT to abandon her kids. But that she did, and her reaction to them all these years later left me cold. I can't like her because I don't get her. Would I get her if I let myself? I'm not sure....

Fuse 8 does an in-depth, interesting review. And here's the KidsReads review that first told me about the book. If you want more summary information, these sites will fill the bill.

MOVIE - A Serious Man

I adored this offbeat black comedy
Released Oct. 2, 2009
R (1:45)
10-29-09 at El Con with Sheila
RT: 85% cag: 93%
Director: Coen Brothers (Joel & Ethan)

Get ready to time travel to 1960's Minneapolis, full of Jefferson Airplane music, F-Troop, Rabbis, bar mitzvahs, and angst, angst, angst. Larry Gopnik, a color professor of physics, slowly watches his life unravel. SPOILER: Anti-semetic next-door-neighbors, mentally disturbed brother who's moved in with the family (and spends most of his day draining the cyst on the back of his neck), wife who is leaving him for an acquaintance, a Korean student who is trying to bribe him into giving him an unfailing grade, a pot-smoking, naked sunbathing next-door-neighbor, visits from the cops, many trips to his lawyer (Adam Arkin) and a number of rabbis...and on and on. We also see what's going on in his son's life, watch this junior version of dad.

Okay, it seems deranged to laugh at the horrible situations that happen to this guy. But you can't help it. It's not long before you realize the only thing you CAN do is laugh, and you sit back and enjoy the wreck of his life. There's quirkiness at every twist and turn. :What else could happen?" you keep asking yourself....and then you find out! This also has one of the best endings I've seen in a movie in a long, long, time.

I'm still thinking about the short beginning piece, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with the storyline at all. I've just about figured it out, though. It's put there to make you think, I'm sure.

Yup, loved it. I guess I'm a bit warped, 'cause you'd have to be, I think, to love this movie.

MOVIE: Doubt

Rating: Time flew by
Viewed: Tuesday, Mar. 2; Crossroads with Sheila
Rotten Tomato: 78% Mine: 80%, almost the same
EW: C+ cag: B+
Genre: Drama
Realeased: 12/12/08
PG-13 (1:44)
Directed (& written by) John Patrick Shanley
Meryl Streep (Acad Award nominee best actress)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (AcAw nominee supporting)
Amy Adams (AcAw nominee supporting)
Viola Davis (AcAw nominees supporting) ***

I had never planned to see this movie - I was nervous watching the previews (I hate the very real problem about sexual abuse concerning priests, even if it is probably just a handful) , and I've always had a....problem.....with the Catholic church. But it was dollar night, with popcorn and soda two bucks each (hey, five dollars for dinner and a movie - who can pass that up?) I'm glad I went. There's a reason why movies get Academy Award nominations. The acting was just plain superb! Viola Davis had perhaps a ten-minute part, but OH MY GOSH! I feel like I can get in front of a class of kids and act it up, but this kind of talent is just awe-inspiring. I couldn't pick out one performance and say it was better or not as good as another.

The story: Sister Aloysius (Streep) is the hard-nosed principal of a NYC parochial school in 1964. Father Flynn (Hoffman) is the middle-aged priest of the church. The two have opposing views about "keeping up with the times." Young Sister James (Adams) is a new teacher who loves teaching history to her 8th graders. She's the one who goes to the principal with things that she's noticed about Father Flynn and one of her students - a black boy who is also an altar boy.

There's never any real proof about anything in this movie, we are left to our own imaginings - as are the protagonists of the story. I've never seen the Tony-Award and Pulitzer Prize award winning play, which is said to be better, but I did enjoy this film very much. And I don't think it's FAIR to compare a play and a movie, especially when they're written by the same person. You just have to sit back and enjoy the incredible acting for an hour and three quarters. It flew by. I'm glad I saw it.

MOVIE: Secret Life of Bees

Rating: Wonderful
Viewed: November 18, 2008
El Con with SW
58% Rotten Tomato Rating
Mine: 90%
EW: C cag: A
Genre: Drama
Released 10/17/08
PG-13 (1 hr 50 min)
Directed by: Gina Prince-Bythewood
Dakota Fanning, Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson, Alicia Keys
adaptation of the book by Sue Monk Kidd

What's not to like? Sure, this would probably be considered a "chick flick," but what's wrong with that? GREAT storytelling, wonderful acting, lovely setting and sets. It's been awhile since I've seen a movie, especially a drama, that I enjoyed this much.

Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother when she was 4. Now, in 1964, living with her mean, unhappy father in what looks like a sharecropper's house on the edge of a peach orchard, she is searching for information about her mother. Her young black housekeeper, Rosalie, seems to be her only friend. While walking into town together, Rosalie is attacked, and beaten by a group of rednecks. Lily breaks her out of her hospital prison room and they take off together to Tiburon, SC, because of a mysterious clue that Lily has found about her mother's past.

This takes them to the Honey Farm of August (Latifah), June (Keys) and May's Pepto-Bismal-pink home. The family takes them in and they instantly become close, Lily sleeping out in the honey shack, and learning about beekeeping with August. The usual touching/interesting ups and downs, friendship, love, racial tension and anger-a great ride toward a powerful (but foreseen) tragedy.

I very much enjoyed this film and would happily watch it again, for all the reasons stated above. Ultimately, a really feel-good movie.

Forever Young - Bob Dylan

Illustrator: Paul Rogers
For: Everyone, especially aging hippies
Published: Sept 23, 2008
Rating: 5 Now on my WISH LIST
Read: Oct. 5, 2008
Endpapers: White: FRONT has an illustration of Dylan with a sign: "Dig Yourself", BACK is the rear of a red VW bug (seen in the book) with bumper sticker: "Don't Look Back"

I want a poster of this book.

As we read the lyrics to this well-known song, we are treated to illustrations that not only follow Dylan's life, but are full of details and tidbids of many of his other songs and the times. Depicted are the famous places of the 60's folk scene, as wll as some of the personages. Nostaligic but not old-fashioned, I poured over the illustrations with gusto (or at least as much gusto as can be displayed in a busy Borders' cafe).

There's lots of negative white space surrounding the illustrations (which I usually don't like), but it works beautifully. This is for sure going to be on my wish list - and I'm writing to Atheneum/Simon and Schuster to see about a poster. They should have included a CD!

Mmmmmmm mmmmmmm good.

A Taste of Colored Water - Matt Faulkner

Perfect for: Kids, Particularly Older Ones
Pub: 2008
Rating: Loved it
Read: Sept. 13, 2008
Endpapers: Both different - the front is an illustration of entering Eden and the back is an illustration of leaving Eden (quite impressive) A+

"Daddy, what color does a person have to be to get a taste of colored water?" Jelly questions at the end of this book.

Welcome to the "Heart of Dixie" in the early 60s. Jelly and LuLu have never been to the "big city" before, but after they hear from Abbey Finch that there's a fountain there with "colored" water, they know they have to go see for themselves. They do. They find it, up on the hill by City Hall with a big sign over it proclaiming COLORED WATER. Meanwhile, as we can see from the illustrations, there's lots goin' on in town. Protesters are marching and singing "We Shall Overcome." Policemen and firemen face off with the marchers as newsmen take photos. Lulu and Jelly watch from the bubbler, where they get nothing but clear water. No lovely fruity-tasting greens or pinks or yellows. And then the fire hoses are turned on and people are knocked over by its force!

Whenever I open a picture book and see illustrated endpapers I already know I'm going to like the book. This was a good one. There are no explanations in the text, just the story. Wonderful vocabulary, a southerny drawl that helps establish the setting, and illustrations that complete enhance the storytelling, becoming part of the story itself. I really want to read this to my middle-schoolers to get their reaction.

I also personally enjoyed Matt Faulkner's AFTERWORD which ends: "It's my wish that we take strength from the courageous ones who came before us and learn to question oppression, racism, segregation - all forms of intolerance - and begin to promote compassion for all."