The Secret Life of Bees

The Secret Life of Bees

Length: 110 min
Rated: PG-13
Distributor: Fox Searchlight Pictures
Release Date:  2008-10-17

Starring: Dakota Fanning, Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys, Jennifer Hudson, Sophie Okonedo Paul Bettany, Nate Parker, Tristan Wilds

Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood

Produced by James Lassiter, Ewan Leslie, Joe Pichirallo, Lauren Shuler Donner, Will Smith
Written by Gina Prince-Bythewood

The Secret Life of Bees belongs in part to the troubled genre of “magical Negro” stories, in which a white protagonist is somehow enlightened or rescued by a particularly special black person (Jim in Huck Finn is an early example). But happily, Sue Monk Kidd’s novel and its adaptation by Gina Prince-Bythewood avoids stereotyping and easy answers, presenting a coming-of-age story that goes easy on the life lessons and forced moments of racial understanding.

Crowded with vibrant characters and a wealth of talent, Secret Life of Bees is cuddly enough for Oprah but never cloying, a refreshing take on the more standard, calculated stories of female empowerment.

Dakota Fanning stars as Lily, a 14-year-old who grew up only with her abusive father, T. Ray (Paul Bettany, a surprisingly convincing Southerner), after she accidentally shot her mother at the age of four. When Lily’s nanny Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson) is beaten by a white mob one her way to register to vote, Lily takes the opportunity to run away from home.

She and Rosaleen make their way to the nearby town of Tiburon, South Carolina, where Lily’s only remaining mementoes of her mother suggest she’ll find a home.

That’s precisely what Lily finds at the Pepto Bismol-pink home of the Boatwright sisters, a trio of black women who run a beekeeping business on their property. The oldest, August (Queen Latifah), immediately accepts Lily into her maternal embrace, while youngest sister June (Alicia Keys), a burgeoning Black Power activist, is more skeptical of the white runaway. Also in the house is May (Sophie Okonedo), emotionally damaged by the death of her twin sister some years earlier, who forms an immediate bond with Rosaleen.

The Elephant King movie

The Elephant King movie

Production Status:     In Production/Awaiting Release
Genres:     Drama
Running Time:     1 hr. 32 min.
MPAA Rating:     R for sexual content, drug use, language and some violence.
Distributors:     Unison Films
Production Co.:     Unison Films, De Warrenne Pictures
Filming Locations:     Thailand
Produced in:     United States

Starring:      Tate Ellington, Jonno Roberts, Florence Faivre, Ellen Burstyn, Josef Sommer

Directed by:     Seth Grossman

Produced by:     Ryan Brooks, Emanuel Michael, Tom Waller

“The Elephant King” is a provocative and stirring story of two American brothers, Oliver and Jake Hunt, adrift in an exotic world they don’t fully understand. When a domineering mother dispatches her young, introverted son Oliver off to Thailand to do everything he can to lure his reckless, older brother back home to the United States to face pending fraud charges, Oliver finds the intoxication of Thailand hard to resist—especially when it has a face as alluring as Lek’s.

As Oliver falls deeply in love for the first time, Jake slips deeper into despair, and the seams of their relationship begin to come undone. When the true extent of Jake’s decadence and self-destruction is revealed to Oliver, he is forced to decide whether he will save his brother’s life or his own.

Blindness movie

When a sudden plague of blindness devastates a city, a small group of the afflicted band together to triumphantly overcome the horrific conditions of their imposed quarantine.

Genres:     Art/Foreign, Drama, Thriller and Adaptation

Running Time:     2 hrs.

Release Date:    October 3rd, 2008 (wide)

MPAA Rating:     R for violence including sexual assaults, language and sexuality/nudity.

Distributors:   Miramax Films

Starring:       Don McKellar, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, Alice Braga

Directed by:     Fernando Meirelles

Produced by:     Simon Channing-Williams, Gail Egan, Akira Ishii

Blindness – Blindness colors Cannes

The Cannes International Film Festival, the most glamorous event on the festival calendar, returns to celebrate its 61st year from May 14 to 25.

It has kicked off with a bang with Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles’s apocalyptic thriller Blindness, starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo.

It was directed by Fernando Meirelles’s from a novel by Portuguese Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago. The novel of the same name tells the apocalyptic story of a plague of blindness sweeping the world.

Blindness is Fernando Meirelles’ third film after his 2002’s thriller City of God and 2005’s The Constant Gardener.

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Burn After Reading movie release September 12 2008

Genre Comedy, Drama
Release Date September 12, 2008
Studio Focus Features

Starring

George Clooney as Harry Pfarrer
John Malkovich as Osbourne Cox
Frances McDormand
Brad Pitt as Chad Feldheimer
Tilda Swinton as Katie Cox
Richard Jenkins
Logan Kulick
Lenny Venito

The Coen brothers’ follow-up to their Best Picture-winning No Country for Old Men is — no surprise for this offbeat filmmaking duo — its polar opposite. A sort of Fargo on helium, Burn is a goofball crime caper about two dim-witted gym employees (Pitt and Frances McDormand) who try to extort a curmudgeonly CIA agent (Malkovich) after they come across a CD-ROM containing possibly classified information. A-list names like Clooney and Pitt may sell the most tickets, but it’s the potty-mouthed Malkovich who easily racks up the most laughs. “The first scene I did was a phone call with Brad and Frances,” says Malkovich, whose character drops countless F-bombs throughout the film. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t be there on the soundstage because I was rehearsing a play. So I did it from an apartment in Paris. It was really late at night and I was screaming at the top of my lungs. God knows what the neighbors thought.”

Also along for the ride is newly minted Academy Award winner Swinton, as Malkovich’s testy wife, while Clooney plays her scheming lover — though that doesn’t mean the former Michael Clayton adversaries, who filmed Burn during last year’s Oscar-campaign season, have the best onscreen relationship this go-around, either. Recalls Swinton: “At the end of the shoot, George said, touchingly, wistfully, ‘Well, maybe one day we’ll get to make a film together when we say one nice thing to each other.’”

Ping Pong Playa-movie release September 5 2008

Starring: Jimmy Tsai, Andrew Vo, Khary Payton, Roger Fan, Jim Lau
Directed by: Jessica Yu
Produced by: Jeff Gou, Anne Clements, Michael O. Gallant

Genres: Comedy, Romance and Sports
Running Time: 1 hr. 36 min.
Release Date: September 5th, 2008 (limited)
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language, including some sexual remarks and drug references.
Distributors: IFC Films

Christopher “C-DUB” Wang is a young Chinese-American man who presents himself with a streetwise, ghetto swagger and dreams of a career as a basketball star. But soon he finds his real gift as a ping-pong player and coach, leading an odd squad of students to a local championship.

Save me Movie review – Release September 5 2008

starring: Robert Gant, Chad Allen, Judith Light, Stephen Lang

director: Robert Cary

Release Date: Sep 5, 2008

Running Time: 96 mins.

Country Of Origin: United States

As disagreements continue to heat up between red states and blue states, and liberals and evangelicals during this election season, Save Me makes its debut as a story that may be in search of unlikely middle ground. Filmmaker Robert Cary, who last delved with great wit and warmth into the agony and ecstasy of Jewish relationship debacles in an urban setting with Ira And Abby, goes to nearly opposite extremes with Save Me. Here he veers into highly hot topic territory in a dramatic confrontation between homosexuality and Christian orthodoxy in rural New Mexico.

Chad Allen (St. Elsewhere) is Mark, a young party hard, promiscuous gay coke addict who attempts suicide in a dingy hotel after his latest one night stand bolts and dumps him at dawn. Mark’s distraught family pressures him to check into the males only Genesis House, a born again rehab retreat specializing in a strict regimen of full time faith as the cure for gay ’sexual brokenness.’

Mark’s initial rebellious resistance to his surroundings slowly smooths over into acceptance and personal reflection under the mixed bag of stern and yet caring support from head matriarch Gayle (Judith Light). Consumed by a ‘warriors for Jesus’ style of Christian doctrine and adhering to the literally straight and narrow road as the only acceptable lifestyle, Gayle bans everything from smoking and cursing, to crossing your legs too daintily and same sex glancing. She also recruits available young women periodically to attend a dance party on the grounds, in order to hopefully keep any potential unapproved sexual urges of the Genesis House occupants in check.

But it turns out that Gayle has some fairly unresolved obsessions of her own, related to the death of her son years ago. And her unhealthy, overly prying attachment to Mark eventually shakes up the deceptive calm of the residence in major ways.

Save Me remarkably manages to find a delicate balance between powerfully opposing points of view around religious devotion and sexual preference. And though the film’s sentiments are clearly pro-gay, they’re not quite crafted as evangelical caricature or an assault against Christian values.

At the same time, each character is fleshed out with uncommon sensitivity, in a story where there are ultimately no true villains. The point of Save Me is that fear, not loathing is the greatest enemy to mutual understanding and acceptance of both difference, and the differently desired. Not a bad notion to convey in these morally divisive times

A Secret movie September 5 2008

A secret movie

Running Time: 1 hr. 50 min.

Release Date: September 5th, 2008 (limited)

Starring: Mathieu Amalric, Patrick Bruel, Cecile De France, Ludivine Sagnier, Julie Depardieu

Directed by: Claude Miller

Produced by: Sylvestre Guarino, Yves Marmion, Alfred Hurmer

A secret movie 2008

Adapted from Philippe Grimbert’s celebrated autobiographical novel, Memory (Simon and Schuster), “A Secret” follows the saga of a Jewish family in post-World War II Paris. François, a solitary, imaginative child, invents for himself a brother as well as the story of his parents` past. But on his fifteenth birthday, he discovers a dark family secret that ties his family’s history to the Holocaust and shatters his illusions forever.

Before the war, his father, Maxime, (Patrick Bruel, “The Comedy of Power”) was married to Hannah (Ludivine Sagnier, “Swimming Pool,” “Love Songs,” “A Girl Cut in Two,” “Public Enemy”) when he fell madly in love with Francois’s mother, Tania (Cécile de France, “The Russian Dolls,” “Avenue Montaigne,” “Public Enemy”). As a young Jewish couple living in Nazi-occupied France, Maxime and Tania were compelled to make difficult choices to survive the war while Hannah (Sagnier) would make a decision that would change her life and that of her family forever.

Mister Foe movie review. Release date September 5 2008

Starring: Jamie Bell, Ciarán Hinds, Sophia Myles, Claire Forlani, Ewen Bremner

Release Date: September 5, 2008

Genre Drama, Romance

MPAA Rating R

Duration 95 min.

Studio Magnolia Pictures

Starring Jamie Bell (“King Kong,” “Flags of Our Fathers,” and “Jumper”) in his first starring role in a British film since his breakout debut in “Billy Elliot,” “Mister Foe” a story of people seeing life differently.

Hallam Foe (Bell) is a troubled young man whose knack for voyeurism paradoxically reveals his darkest fears, and his most peculiar desires. A 17-year-old misfit, Hallam spends lonely days spying on others at his father’s (Ciaran Hinds) estate in the Scottish Highlands. Haunted by his mother’s sudden death, he begins to suspect that his beautiful step mother (Claire Forlani) may have had a played a hand in it. Confusing matters even more for Hallam, he finds himself attracted and repelled by her in equal measure.

When the tension that has been brewing between the two erupts, Hallam runs away. Out of money and out of friends, he crashes down into reality in Edinburgh. Adept at fading into the background and peering in on the lives of others to escape his own every day life, he continues what he learned at home to the city. He soon becomes obsessed with Kate (Sophia Myles), who bears an uncanny resemblance to his mother. When his world collides with Kate’s and the reality of life back home, he is faced with betraying the memory of the mother he longs for or using his one last chance to grow up.

Directed and co-written by David Mackenzie (“Young Adam”), “Mister Foe” stars Jamie Bell, Sophia Myles (“Tristan + Isolde,” “Thunderbirds”), Claire Forlani (“Meet Joe Black,” “CSI: NY”) and Ciaran Hinds (“There Will Be Blood,” upcoming “Stop Loss”). “Mister Foe” is produced by Gillian Berrie, co-written by Ed Whitmore, based on the novel “Hallam Foe” by Peter Jinks, and executive produced by Matthew Justice. The film was an Official Selection at the Berlin Film Festival and the Edinburgh Film Festival.

August Evening movie release September 5 2008

August evening movie

• Cast: Pedro Castaneda, Veronica Loren, Abel Becerra, Walter Perez, Sandra Rios
• Director: Chris Eska
• Studio: Maya Entertainment
• Genres: Drama, Family Drama, Slice of Life
• Duration: 128 mins

There are stories that depict how resilient family bonds are in times of duress, and those that reject such rosy ideals to show how tenuous even blood relationships can be, but first-timer Chris Eska’s Spanish-language drama (and Spirit Award winner for Best Feature Under $500,000) quietly and bittersweetly validates both notions.

In the rural southern Texas of some long-lost Terrence Malick film (where it’s always magic hour!), graying paterfamilias and illegal farm worker Jaime (Pedro Castaneda) loses his wife, then his job, provoking him to hop a bus with his widowed daughter-in-law Lupe (Veronica Loren) to see his surviving kids in San Antonio.

Passed off between the proud, working-class son who never told him about his grandchild and the annoyed, suburban daughter who hooked up with a white man, Jaime’s only security is Lupe, a guarded introvert who feels overly pressured to remarry by a family she’s not even related to.

Perhaps Eska didn’t have to write all of his characters into overlapping crossroads of crisis, but he’s more nuanced than overt, and his cast (especially Loren and the nonprofessional Castaneda) sells it.

We see exactly how the older and younger generations let each other down as their time together ticks slowly away—and boy, does it ever: Eska’s visual digressions are lyrical in the moment (think early David Gordon Green), but ultimately indulgent at over two hours.