Elwood P. Dowd: Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be" - she always called me Elwood - "In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.

Click here for a wonderful time on the Internet Movie Database (IMBD) for more memorable quotes from the film classic "Harvey" (1950) starring James Stewart, of course.

Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle of the Hastings, England police department says, "No. Murder is murder and must be apprehended."

Anthony Horowitz, the man behind the Midsomer Murders series and this, has created a splendidly subtle drama. That subtlety extends from the plots, sets, characterizations, and performances...really every aspect of "Foyle's War" and thus keeps the viewer's quieter sensibilities engaged while pondering not just who dun it, but also the heart of the moral crisis presented each week.

What I love about "Foyle's War" is how it shows that suffering is equal opportunity. Not only do the obvious people suffer during war, that is, the soldiers on either side who die and their surviving families, but the fabric of society suffers as well.

Last night in Series Six, Film Two: Broken Souls: The soldier who survives and returns suffers. The son of that soldier and the wife of that soldier suffers. The soldiers who saw battle and are treated at the local mental ward suffer; the physician treating these same soldiers whose family is lost in war-torn Europe suffers.

Meanwhile, Foyle, steadfastly played by Michael Kitchen, soldiers on...showing us a vaster reach of human intelligence and spirit.

"What's it about?" We asked the pretty young thing staffing the ticket counter.

"Oh, three elderly ladies take a trip together."

Stifling our giggles, Rebecca and I decided this was good enough for us. We proffered our money for tickets...and the Young Thing gave us the Senior Price, no questions asked.

We moved a discrete distance away from the ticket booth and gave way to the giggles overcoming us. Elderly ladies...out on a toot...that, apparently, was us, at 50 and 59.

It's hard to imagine Jessica Lange (Arvilla Holden), Joan Allen and Kathy Bates---the three female buddy leads in "Bonneville" who hit the road across the West from Pacatello, Idaho to Santa Barbara...as "elderly." Lange never looked more beautiful and there's a fun romance in here that you just wouldn't expect if the sterotypes were followed.

Arvilla's 1966 Bonneville convertible enjoys the detours to Bryce Canyon and Las Vegas and such. Tom Skerritt and Christine Baranski also give fine performances in BONNEVILLE with considerable elan.

I loved this article by A. O. Scott so much that I called up Daniel in Northern California at an unseemly earlly hour to read it to him and to discuss it with him.

Here's a passage I like, now that I'm back in the Midwest and surrounded by Midwestern speech and action:

But the plain-spoken Midwestern clarity of Mr. Ebert’s prose and his genial, conversational presence on the page may, in the end, make him a more useful and reliable companion for the dedicated moviegoer. ---A. O. Scott

Film critics on T. V. changed our culture. Before, folks just went to the movies, and came out and had a cup of coffee. Now, everyone is a film critic. Aren't you?

Login to the NY Times online to read the rest of A. O. Scott's fine essay on the filmic panarama of human migration.

Click here for 2005 Washington Post article written before Madame Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's election.

What I love about this film is how it shows the good news and bad news about Africa in one long shot, so we can see it more clearly, see it more whole. We see what's hurting and we see the strength, the saavy, the fierce passion that comes to suture the wound, in the form of Madame Sirleaf and her team, heavily weighted with women of substance, of grace, of capacity.

Madame Ellen Johnson Sirleaf focuses on the practical, and her experience as an economist holds her in good stead. But she knows her culture. She knows her people. She knows her role. She dresses for each occasion with the scarf of authority over her shoulder and she looks gorgeous at whatever age, in this case in her latter 60s.

She shifts to suit the occasion. She's a great communicator. She can speak Pigeon English with the workers at the Firestone rubber plantation. She can tell them the truth, a rare commodity in any political situation: what the government can do and what it cannot do. She can negotiate with heads of delegation and heads of companies speaking perfectly groomed educated English, but speaking it so clearly, without jargon, that no one good possibly miss her meaning as she lobbies for the rights of Liberians...as she struggles for the very life of her country and country people.

This is a portrait of a country ripped by too many years of civil war...and a portrait of a woman who has the heart of a lioness on the broad African veld, ready to hunt to save her pride of cubs.

My favorite scene in the movie shows Madame Sirleaf talking with the soldiers about back pay. First, she is the understanding Old Ma, nodding, listening, receptive. Then, she shifts, nobody's fool, not letting those on the other side of the table that she is in charge here...and she is firmly on the side of the villagers. Solomon in all his glory could have done no better than Madame Sirleaf.

Anyone who loves Africa...anyone who understands the special ties that America has with Liberia (founded as it was by freed slaves)...anyone who prays for peace and reconciliation...anyone interested in the process of resolving conflict and creating a culture of trust and inclusion in the face of daunting obstacles....anyone who loves courage and justice...in short, anyone with a beating heart and a thinking brain should see this film.

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DIRECTORS BIOGRAPHY

Daniel Junge was named by Filmmaker magazine as one of 25 up-and-coming filmmakers in 2003. Junge had his feature-length directorial debut with Chiefs, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Documentary, and subsequently received national airing on PBS. He also won four regional Emmy’s for Common Good (2005), a six-part series on social entrepreneurs.

Co-Director Siatta Scott-Johnson was born in Buchanan, Liberia, 1974, and raised in rural Grand Bassa County. She has five years of experience as a reporter and producer at DCTV, one of Liberia’s few broadcast television stations, and is a founding member of Omuahtee Africa Media.

Director Rob Reiner and writer Justin Zackham's comedy-drama "The Bucket List" provides much-needed education on living and dying for American society This is a buddy movie with a twist when "two terminally ill men escape from a cancer ward and head off on a road trip with a wish list of to-dos before they die" (Internet Movie Database, IMD)

I love the tagline:"When he closed his eyes, his heart was opened" which we hear in Morgan Freeman's voice-over at the beginning as the camera pans over the magestic Himalayas...before dropping us down into a car repair shop. These two visual journeys define the tone of the movie: the transcendent and ordinary nature of life, revealed.

Friendship reaches across class and race in the bond of impending death. Can a be-zillion dollars buy happiness? No, but the money can open a world (and provide the viewer with a great travelogue fantasy). Within that open world of possibility, heart education happens.

For we Boomers, Nicholson and Freeman are iconic actors. Here they play off each other to perfection, in roles we've come to associate with them: the wise ass and the wise man. I don't have to tell you which is which.

If you had six months to live, what would be on your bucket list? How would you go about finding the joy in your life?

NOTE:

Please check out Jana Segal's reviews at Reel Inspiration. There's lots going on over there. Jana's on a mission to spread the news about inspiriting films. Besides reviews you'll find news about their film contest, directing workshop, and other film events. This is also where you can share or recommend movies with their community that you consider "inspiring, give hope or raise human consciousness." --JGR

You might also want to check out George Crile's book "Charlie Wilson's War" upon which the film is based. --JGR

Mary and Alan Blay-Brody

The film "Charlie Wilson's War" begins with a ceremony at CIA headquarters, honoring Texas Democratic Congressman Charlie Wilson for his role in getting the mujahideen funded and armed to drive Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, ultimately having much to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The ceremony presumably takes place in1992, the year the Soviet Union came apart, and Afghan President Najibullah's government finally collapsed in Kabul. The film ends with an epigraph:

These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world. And then we fucked up the end game.

I went to work in UNICEF's Afghanistan program not long after that, in March, 1993, and so I was a front-line witness to the fucking up of the end-game. (Click here to read Alan Brody's in-depth article of political analysis of Afhanistan and personal anecdote in the Virginia Quarterly on-line, a web exclusive.)

Most reviews of the film emphasize its good humor and pacing, particularly the performance and charm of Tom Hanks as the hard-drinking and womanizing Charlie Wilson, and the edge of Philip Seymour Hersh as the CIA agent Gust. There are laughs all the way through, and flashes of nudity to keep movie-goer grapevines titillated.

Some of the more politically inclined reviewers have expressed dissatisfaction with the film, as being too light or shallow. One suspects they are hoping to hijack the local Cineplex to project some manifesto on the screen, to be read aloud in their own stirring voices in full sound-surround.

I differ from those critics, and think director Mike Nichols has done an impressive job to weave historical events and serious political themes into a story that has enough laughter, sex, satire and charm to make a commercial success in middle America.

Within that genre, Charlie Wilson's War has retained considerable raw truth just underneath the light surface of this film. The American collective mind, immersed in our media hot-tub and aerated by the bubbling of 24-hour news, has practically forgotten that the "Afghan War" was for 14 years not the current American and NATO action, but a much bigger struggle that raged from 1979-92, with no small amount of U.S. engagement in it.

Intent on ensuring the Soviets got a bite in the ass in return for their Afghanistan invasion (and perhaps hoping for little payback for Vietnam), America empowered forces that have now turned around to bite Uncle Sam in the ass. The film provides discomforting reminders of that, perhaps accounting for the unease of some reviewers who seem not quite sure what to make of it.

Charlie says, "we fucked up the end game." It didn't have to be that way. In 1994, after the fall of Communism, the mujahideen groups in Afghanistan were bickering and fighting among themselves, with support to these different factions coming from their patrons in Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia. That was the time when the United States, at the height of its global power, abandoned them completely.

There was no diplomatic leadership from America to resolve the conflicts, and to set in motion a rebuilding of Afghanistan. Families who had suffered and sacrificed, taking the frontline brunt of the West's fight with Communist expansionism, were abandoned by America to suffer even more after the victory.

"Charlie Wilson's War" just hints at that abandonment. The movie tells the story of how Charlie had manipulated Congressional levers of power to increase American military aid to the mujahideen to the scale of billions of dollars. But in a scene near the end, in a small committee room, he can't convince his colleagues to include even a million dollars for schools for Afghan children, once the war has wound down. "Who gives a fuck?" seems to be the response.

In the context of our current drift into quagmire in Afghanistan, the most disturbing message of this film, to those who care to think about it, is that our country has not gleaned even an ounce of wisdom from these fuck-ups of the past. With a President who can't even remember his personal history from 30 years ago, and an Administration that erases archives and makes "I don't recall" a mantra against accountability, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised.

In Pakistan and Afghanistan today, America showers billions on "friends," Texas politicos decide foreign policy based on oil interests and military contracts, and the Afghan people will soon celebrate the 30th anniversary of their sufferings for being in the wrong location on the map of America's strategic interests.

But not to worry, at the theatre you can still get a soft drink and buttered popcorn to assuage your hunger, on special for $7.95.

I saw "Sweeney Todd" on my birthday with another December brithday gal, Liz Parker, who leads the Alton writing group and is the daughter of Bill Parker, who worked with my father as business agent for the union when my dad was the steward and one of the negotiators. Liz suggested we go to The Moolah Theatre and Lounge, the Riverfront Times' choice for "Best Movie Theater in St. Louis." And, why not? The Moolah isn't a mulit-plex, it's a mega-plex---in the old time grand style---and with real leather couches. They even named special drinks after Sweeney Todd. Very fun and very funny.

Were it not for the dark humor of "Sweeney Todd" with the stylized oceans of gore and gorgeously ghoulish cinematography, it would be just too grim to watch. Yet, here we see, through exaggeration and the ultimate extension of passionate logic, what happens when a heart is hurt and hardened...and yet...cannot quite extinguish the last bit of tenderness that would allow it rest.

I don't think I've seen this much blood outside a war movie since "The Godfather." Luckily, I let the music tell me when it's best to close my eyes, so I only saw a fraction of drops of the many buckets spilled.

Johnny Depp's lock of white hair streaking through the dishevelled blackness reminded me of Cruella De Vil in the original Disney "101 Dalmations" I saw as a child. (Come to think of it, killing all those puppies for her Dalmation fur coathas some analagous value to the meat pie murders.)

Depp is extraordinary as this edgy protaganist...neither hero nor villian, but powerful in his portrayal because still human. Spilling all the blood in the world cannot heal a human heart. "Never forget. Never forgive" is the marketing slogan for the film. We learn how this can twist against us...and there's no way to tape up a slit neck of the person you love.

"Melvin Beaunorus Tolson (February 6, 1898–August 29, 1966) was an American Modernist poet, educator, columnist, and politician. His work concentrated on the experience of African Americans and includes several poetic histories. He was a contemporary of the Harlem Renaissance and, although he was not a participant in it, his work reflects its influences. Liberia declared Tolson as its poet laureate in 1947." Click here to read more about Melvin B. Tolson in Wikipedia.
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The lights were off as a couple slid into the theater. I held down the seat next to me and said, "It's just started. You haven't missed too much."

The audience at the Chase Park Cinema for "The Great Debaters" was the most integrated of any I've seen in St. Louis during the six months I've lived here. That was good in itself. But it was like being in church, too. When Samantha reaches the perioration in her debate speech in Okalahoma that "NOW is the time for freedom!" the audience applauded and cheered. When James Farmer Jr. began to tell his deepest truth in the debate at Harvard, an older man behind me whispered, "Tell it. Go on and tell it, son!" When the epigraph notes ran telling us that the bad boy turned preacher, we laughted together, with real joy in a saved soul.

The plot is interwoven like a fine rope. Jim Crow politics in the Texan South, educational challenge, debate as a sports team, union organizing that crosses the color bar, family shame and family pride, community strength...so many themes dodging and weaving as they braid their way around our hearts as we watch and respond to this fine film directed by Denzel Washington and produced by Oprah Winfrey.