Two Days, One Night: Struggling to Survive

You may not always agree with the Oscars and their penchant to nominate small movies over popular ones, or honor stodgy favorites over diverse newcomers. But despite all the lobbying and glad-handing that make up the Oscars race, there are always a couple of nominations for truly deserving films that would otherwise have been overlooked. Marion Cotillard's Best Actress nomination for the Belgian movie, Two Days, One Night is a perfect example.

Written and directed by the Dardenne brothers, Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit if we want to acknowledge the actual French title) is a masterclass in deeply personal, dramatic storytelling. Cotillard plays Sandra, a woman who has been away from her job in a solar panel factory for a few months due to severe depression. After therapy and medication, she is ready to return to work. Unfortunately, in her absence, her employers have discovered that 16 people could easily do the job of 17 and that they don't need her. On Friday, the foreman tells her colleagues to vote on whether they want Sandra to be hired back, or whether they want their bonus of 1,000 euros. He implies that if Sandra is not fired, someone else will be, which scares 14 out of 16 people into voting for their bonuses. However, after discussing it with the boss, Sandra's friend Juliette is able to request a secret ballot to be held on Monday, where everyone will vote again, this time without the threat of redundancy if Sandra returns. Now Sandra has a weekend to convince at least 9 colleagues to vote for her instead of the bonus.

It's a beautiful story, filled with urgency and despair and genuine humanity. Cotillard's performance is heartbreaking - Sandra's depression is constantly trembling on the surface, threatening to engulf her and sweep her back into the abyss. Her loving husband, Manu (Fabrizio Rongione), is her champion, cajoling and supporting her, insisting that she fight for her job and take a stand, yet trying his best to not push her too hard. As she meets each of the 16 people she needs to convince to vote for her, we are introduced to a diverse range of working-class people, all of whom have very valid reasons for wanting their bonuses. Their reactions to the pleading Sandra are incredibly varied; some flat-out refuse to vote for her, while others have amazingly moving reactions when confronted by this woman whose life depends on their decision.

It might seem odd to call this movie a thriller but it is genuinely tense as you near the end and wonder what the outcome of the vote will be. These are the kinds of high-stake situations that working-class families face every day and it is gripping to see this story play out on the big screen. Hollywood rarely deigns to tell the story of ordinary people who are just struggling to get by, but Two Days, One Night is a fascinating look at one woman and what constitutes a fight for her life and dignity. It is thoroughly satisfying and unpredictable, a perfect human movie. 

Birdman: Backstage at Broadway

Birdman is a technical masterpiece. Shot so that the entire movie looks like it was filmed in one take (a la Hitchcock's Rope, albeit much more sophisticated), the movie is a mesmerizing, claustrophobic look behind the scenes of a Broadway play and a winking ode to Hollywood, stardom, and the dangers of staging a comeback.

Michael Keaton stars as Riggan Thomson, an actor who famously played the superhero Birdman decades ago (a hilarious nod to Keaton's real-life tenure as Batman), but has been on a bit of a career downslide ever since. He has now decided to establish himself as a serious actor by writing, directing, and starring in a play adapted from a Raymond Carver short story. The movie starts the day before previews are due to begin, when an actor is injured by a falling light and Riggan has to deal with the first of many snafus that will cause the play to devolve into a raucous shambles. 

The movie's tone is black and hysterical. The cast is pitch perfect, with Emma Stone playing Sam, Riggan's fresh-out-of-rehab daughter who is obsessed with social media and fed up with her father; Naomi Watts and Edward Norton playing a couple of married actors with wildly differing levels of Broadway experience and narcissism; Zach Galifianakis as Riggan's best friend and producer, who will do or say anything to get the show on the road; and Andrea Riseborough and Amy Ryan as Riggan's current girlfriend and ex-wife, an interesting duo who only serve to complicate matters further. 

I've neglected to mention another key character - Birdman himself. Throughout the movie, Riggan has hallucinatory (or maybe not?) conversations with Birdman, who has a very Christian Bale-like sinister voice and is constantly tormenting Riggan with his failures and ineptitude. The sense of dreamy insanity is further propelled by the brilliant percussive score by Antonio Sanchez, a drum-fueled nightmare that relentlessly pounds through every scene and keeps you on the edge of your seat. 

Ultimately, Birdman is a movie I need to see multiple times before I figure out what it's about and how I feel about it. Director (and co-writer) Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has created what is clearly a cinematic masterpiece, but it feels so perfect and polished that I felt distanced from it. It contains some sharply-observed humor and reflections on the state of Hollywood, and the performances, particularly by Keaton and Norton, are blustery and brilliant. It's a great movie, but it is also twisted, bizarre, and weird, and it demands to be dissected and analyzed for a good long while. 

Whiplash: The Frenzy of Ambition

Every year, there are movies that I know I ought to watch but keep putting off because they don't seem like my cup of tea. This year, Whiplash was one of those movies. I had heard good things, but nothing that made me think I would love it. But oh how wrong I was. Having seen it, this is one of my favorite movies of the year.

The premise is simple. Miles Teller plays Andrew Neimann, a nineteen-year old freshman at the prestigious Shaffer Conservatory in New York City (cough Juilliard). He is a jazz drummer, and he aspires to be one of the greatest drummers the world has ever known. He tries to catch the eye of Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), who is the conductor of the school's premiere jazz band and is the man who can lead him to greatness. Unfortunately, this is not some Good Will Hunting-esque professor who will kindly teach Andrew how to achieve his dreams and wisely prepare him for the world. Fletcher is a foul-mouthed, chair-throwing, abusive, manipulative monster of a man and Whiplash is the story of what happens when you put two unlikable but insanely driven perfectionists in a room and force them to challenge each other.

Written and directed by Damien Chazelle (based on his own hellish personal experiences as a drummer in a high school jazz band), Whiplash is a breathtakingly frenetic and fantastic movie. I don't know anything about drumming, but Miles Teller certainly seemed to be drumming the hell out of every scene, and J.K. Simmons is simply terrifying, unpredictable, and brilliant. This should not be an easy movie to watch, but you cannot tear your eyes away from the screen as you see these two characters push themselves to the limit, scale the heights of insanity, and just keep going. All they care about is jazz, family and relationships be damned, and the drums pound relentlessly on until the final frame of the film.

Whiplash is a movie about music and the pursuit of unattainable standards of perfection. The final scene is the most pulse-pounding, magnificent thing I witnessed all year and showcases the power of cinema to just sweep you away without a single word. The astonishing music, the tight frantic editing, the sweat and blood pouring on to the drums: it's simply incredible. J.K. Simmons is assuredly walking away with an Oscar for this performance, and Damien Chazelle is a very solid contender for Best Adapted Screenplay. Whiplash is what independent cinema is all about: taut, intense, dramatic stories that start small but blow up into epic tales. It is a spellbinding piece of work.

Dear Committee Members: A Darkly Hilarious Tale

There's nothing I admire more than a good epistolary novel. Telling a whole story simply through a series of letters is a feat that amazes me, and Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher is no exception. This is also an absolutely hilarious book that revels in its absurdity and explores some dark truths about the perils of academia, publishing, and gradually fading ambition.

The novel consists of a series of recommendation letters penned by Professor Jason Fitger, a Creative Writing and English professor at Payne University somewhere in the Midwest. Fitger has written more than 1,300 recommendation letters for students and colleagues (he keeps careful records of all these missives) and at this point in his life, they are clearly starting to take a toll. His writing style is blisteringly sarcastic, long-winded, and self-important. Regardless of who he's writing to and who he's recommending, each letter manages to feature several references to his own miserable lot in life and the various complaints he has against the college administration, the state of publishing, the insidious plague of technology and e-mail, and of course, the unnecessary hell of having to write recommendation letters.

Whether it's Fitger's rants about the Economics Department--which gets oodles of funding while the English Department slowly loses professors, is clouded in a construction-induced asbestos haze, and is led by a clueless Chair from Sociology--or his increasingly frantic attempts to cajole his ex-wife and ex-girlfriend into doing him favors for his students, or his furious tirades as he attempts to complete online recommendation forms, you won't be able to stop laughing as you make your way through this novel. It's also amazing to see how Fitger's writing style changes depending on whom he's addressing and the subject of the letter. His genuine recommendations reveal him to be someone who does care for his students and wants them to succeed in life, but that goodwill is largely undermined by his cantankerous and overbearing nature when he tries to teach others a lesson and rail against the death of the liberal arts in the face of modern technology and science. There are also intriguing moments when you realize that you are just reading his letters, not his mind, and that perhaps you can't trust everything he has committed to the page.

Dear Committee Members has moments of darkness, of course, but by and large, it is a spectacular character study, and a witty look at what it means to be an academic in the humanities today. It is a refreshingly quick read (you can easily polish it off in a few hours) but once you do, you'll probably just want to re-read it. It is a brilliant, biting novel that made me wonder if any of my professors wrote such horrific recommendation letters for me when I was in college. I certainly hope not, but in hindsight, it would have been really funny if they had. 

The Theory of Everything: Love & Physics

I was under the impression that The Theory of Everything would be very similar to The Imitation Game. Both are movies about brilliant British scientists who did extraordinary things in their fields yet faced tremendous personal hardships. However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that rather than being a biopic about a lone genius, The Theory of Everything is much more focused on the relationship between Stephen Hawking and his first wife, Jane, and their extraordinary journey together.

Perhaps this is not surprising, as the movie is based on Jane Hawking's memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen. Felicity Jones plays Jane, who meets Stephen (Eddie Redmayne) in Cambridge and is captivated by this slightly awkward but funny and brilliant physicist. When Stephen is diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease and given two years to live, Jane refuses to leave his side, and insists that they spend whatever time he has left with each other. They get married, have children, and despite Stephen's rapid physical deterioration, he somehow continues to defy the odds. His scintillating theories on black holes and the origins of the universe earn him his PhD and while he now has to resort to a wheelchair and has increasingly slurred speech, he is still earning academic accolades and delivering brilliant lectures to his astonished peers.

The script by Anthony McCarten beautifully and lovingly portrays the heartbreaking evolution of their relationship. As Stephen becomes more debilitated, Jane gets more overwhelmed, unable to take care of him and their children full-time while also pursuing her own academic career. They both develop emotional attachments to other people but are still bonded by their enduring love for each other. It is easy to see how these two incredible people came together, but equally easy to see how they gradually moved apart.

Redmayne and Jones deliver simply astonishing performances and they fully deserve all the accolades coming their way. I expected this to be completely Redmayne's picture - after all, he is portraying an iconic figure who changed the world and defied all expectations. His performance is spectacular; he completely morphs into Hawking, gradually letting his limbs lose their function one by one until he is finally transformed into the wheelchair-bound, robot-voiced Professor that we all know today. But Jones is equally marvelous, portraying a strong, extraordinary woman, who fully embodies the idea of "the woman behind the man." She captures all of Jane's wit, intelligence, strength, and vulnerability, and it is clear to see that the Hawking household did not contain just one genius.

The Theory of Everything is a wonderful romantic tale, anchored by two incredible performances, an impeccable script, a moving score by Johann Johannson, and solid direction by James Marsh. It is uplifting and triumphant, and a glorious behind-the-scenes look at a very famous man and the woman who helped him achieve his dreams. 

Wild: Grief, Courage, and Letting Go

When this year's Oscar nominations were announced, it was disheartening to see how almost all of the Best Picture nominations were for movies about men. The lack of female leads in the Best Picture race is appalling, but at least the Best Actress field showcases five movies where women truly delivered the goods. After watching Wild, you will be astonished by Reese Witherspoon's performance and strongly reminded of just how fantastic it is to watch movies where women get to just be themselves.

Wild is based on the memoir of the same name by Cheryl Strayed. It is the story of her 1100-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, a journey she embarked upon on as a way to start afresh after a particularly heinous period of her life. After the death of her beloved mother a few years ago, Cheryl had spiraled into grief, destroying her marriage, engaging in casual sex and heroin use, and generally unable to find any purpose to her life. By hiking along the PCT, she hoped to finally deal with her wild grief and come to terms with her turbulent past before embarking on her future.

Director Jean-Marc Vallee and writer Nick Hornby have created a dreamy, beautiful movie that chooses to follow a free-associating narrative rather than a wildly conventional biopic form. It is anchored by Cheryl's journey, counting the days and miles hiked, but most of the movie is told in flashbacks, accompanied by beautiful images, weird hallucinations, dreams, and nightmares. This movie is "wild" in every sense of the term; the locations are primitive and awesome, Witherspoon's performance is raw and unrelenting, and every scene contains an unflinching maelstrom of sadness, beauty, and perseverance.

We are so used to seeing men embark on these journeys but it is extraordinary to see a woman on her own, free to explore her psyche and think about her life, unfettered and unbound by convention. The movie doesn't shy away from the dangers of being a lone woman hiker, and Cheryl has to deal with her fair share of creeps on the trail, but she has already endured so much in her past that she is more than equal to the challenge. She endures innumerable physical hardships, but the emotional scars are the ones that bleed the most. The flashbacks to her mother (played wonderfully by Laura Dern) deeply resonate, giving us a sense of who this woman was and the enormity of her loss that has led her to this present moment. It is a courageous and devastating story that is wonderful to witness.

Wild is a spectacular movie that tells a very necessary and moving tale. From beginning to end, you are side by side with Cheryl on this journey and you emerge at the other end of the trail with a sense of fulfillment and gratitude. I did not know just how much I had missed watching a woman fearlessly lead a movie until I saw Wild. I can only hope that 2015 gives us many more movies about women, by women, for women. 

The Imitation Game: An Unsung Hero

Alan Turing was a British computer scientist who is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science. He was a genius and a war hero, but owing to the classified nature of his work during World War II and the unjust treatment he received in the 50s after being prosecuted for homosexuality, he remained largely unknown to the British public. In recent years, there has been a growing movement to restore Turing to his rightful place in the British consciousness and The Imitation Game does an excellent job of bringing this man's story to the world.

The movie opens in 1952, when Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is brought into police custody for some mysterious reason. His voiceover begins to tell his story and we are transported back to 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, when the young Turing arrives at Bletchley Park for a job interview. Despite a fractious conversation with Commander Alastair Denniston (Charles Dance), Turing is too intelligent to ignore and is hired to be a part of a team of cryptographers tasked with cracking the German Enigma code. The team consists of a group of men who are mostly trying to break the code by trial and error but Turing knows the only way to tackle Enigma is to develop a machine that can quickly go through the millions of permutations and break the new code every day. Therefore, he sets out to design a giant machine to solve this giant riddle. His team thinks he is insane and there is a great deal of friction among them, but when he hires the brilliant mathematician, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), she becomes his guide to how to interact with his team and work together to save the world. 

The movie zigs and zags between time periods, alternating between Turing's boarding school years, his time at Bletchley, and his later years in Manchester. As the movie progresses, you see how screenwriter Graham Moore's script is cleverly weaving in elements from different times and giving us an insight into how this man's very complicated brain might work. The meat of the story is what transpires in Bletchley Park and Benedict Cumberbatch wholeheartedly steps into Turing's skin, bringing all of his intelligence and social awkwardness to bear. Knightley is a welcome addition to the male-dominated cast and is able to bring a much-needed dose of feminine intelligence and drive to the movie, even if she has no other women to talk to. Her struggles to be a career woman in this conservative era are on par with Turing's struggles to just get along with his peers and the two of them play marvelously off of each other and the rest of the cast. The other characters are rather stereotypical, but the actors playing them are excellent. You have Matthew Goode as the roguish Hugh Alexander, Allen Leech as the seemingly affable John Cairncross, and Mark Strong playing the macho and mysterious MI6 man in the shadows. It's a great British ensemble and while the dialogue sometimes get very predictable, it never stop being entertaining. 

The Imitation Game is a story about unconventional people that is told fairly conventionally by director Morten Tyldum. However, it is elevated by the engaging subject matter, the superb performances, and its ability to be funny, sympathetic, and devastating. The score by Alexandre Desplat is wonderful, a sort of digital symphony that captures the urgency and beauty of Turing's work as he races to crack Enigma and bring about an end to the war. While the script takes many historical liberties, it captures the broad strokes of this man's extraordinary life and the extraordinary team of people in Bletchley who may have helped save 14 million lives by cracking Enigma. After setting Turing up as the brilliant figure that he was, it is then heart-wrenching to view his eventual downfall as he is cruelly prosecuted for his homosexuality and eventually forgotten by the world. Thankfully, with this movie, he is being restored to his proper legacy and will remain forgotten no longer. 

Selma: Past & Present

Given the current political climate, there is no more apt time to watch Selma, the story of the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to protest racial injustice and demand equal voting rights for African Americans. The day after I watched this movie, the news was filled with images of people marching in Paris and I was shocked at how much those images from 2015 echoed the images from 1965. People standing together in the aftermath of violence and peacefully expressing their solidarity and hope for a better future. It's both sad and beautiful to see how things haven't changed.

I won't go into further details about the plot of Selma because you need to see it unfold on the screen for yourself. Director Ava DuVernay has done a simply awe-inspiring job of constructing a movie that is both compelling yet difficult to watch. There are shocking moments when you feel like you have been brutally tricked into witnessing something you never saw coming and then other moments when you feel uplifted and roused by the powerful rhetoric of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the men and women who are fighting so hard to change the world. King is played by David Oyelowo, an actor who ought to be winning awards left and right for this performance but seems to have been unconscionably snubbed. He fully captures the magnetism and power of the man and the strength of his convictions; every time he got on a podium and started to speak, I wanted to stand up and cheer.

Apart from the speeches, however, DuVernay and Paul Webb's intelligent script manages to capture the more subtle theater of orchestrating these civil rights campaigns and figuring out the logistics of where a protest will be most effective and have the greatest impact. King's conversations with President Johnson (played very effectively by Tom Wilkinson) are vital to demonstrating the administration's initial hesitations and the push that was needed to get the Voting Rights Act passed in Congress. More importantly, King's conversations with his fellow activists highlight the complexities of the fight and the difficulty of focusing on just one issue when the injustices were so widespread. Selma features a truly wonderful ensemble cast, including Carmen Ejogo, Andre Holland, Common, Wendell Pierce, Oprah Winfrey, and more, all of whom represent key players in the civil rights movement who had tremendously important roles. They have their own private battles, victories and defeats, but they are all united in this show of non-violent protest to demand their right to participate in their democracy. In fact, King is far from being the hero of the piece; it is abundantly clear that this is a movement that depended on many heroic men and women to bring about social change.

Selma is shot beautifully, edited meticulously, and crafted with care. The soundtrack is particularly effective, featuring several different genres of music that are all equally evocative and come in at just the right moment for every key scene of the film. By focusing on such a specific period of history, rather than trying to encompass all of King's life, the movie manages to capture so much more nuance and detail about the struggle for civil rights and the accompanying heartbreaks and successes. It is a wonderfully acted, thoughtful, and engaging look at an incredibly fraught period in American history. It offers a glimpse at the very human man behind the legend of Dr. King, and while it is not overly critical of the people involved, it certainly exposes them all as human beings with their individual fears and failings.

The most sobering thing about Selma, of course, is how relevant it feels to the present day. Back in 1965, people were claiming that race was no longer a problem in America since African Americans had the right to vote. The Selma marches were a reminder that having the right to vote was not the same as actually being able to vote. Now, in 2015, we still live in an America where people claim to be living in a post-racial society while unarmed black teenagers are unlawfully killed and voter ID laws come back into effect to disenfranchise poor minority voters. Selma is a brilliant look at what tenacious and intelligent people achieved in the 60s, but it is a reminder of how much still remains to be achieved in the 21st century. We shall overcome some day, but not today.

Big Eyes: A Bizarre True Tale

Big Eyes may be directed by Tim Burton but rather than being weirdly Burtonesque, it feels more weirdly Wes Andersonesque. Perhaps this impression was heightened by the inclusion of Jason Schwartzman as a snooty art gallery owner, but overall, this is a vivid, colorful, oddball of a movie, made all the more bizarre because it is based on a true story.

We are first introduced to Margaret Ulbrich (Amy Adams) in the 1950s. She has just left her no-good husband and is driving to San Francisco with her young daughter to start a new life. She is an artist who loves to draw pictures of children with big, sad eyes and as she desperately tries to find a job, she sells paintings and caricatures to make some money on the side. While selling caricatures in a park, she meets Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), a devilishly charming man who takes a shine to Margaret and her artistry. Following a whirlwind romance, the two get married and Margaret starts signing her paintings with the name "Keane." Walter, who can never get anyone to buy his generic paintings of Paris that he paints from his memories of the one week he spent in France, happens to show off some of Margaret's paintings and discovers that there's interest in her work. Ever the showman, he pretends to be the artist, and with his marketing savvy and ability to schmooze, the Keane art empire takes off. 

You would have gathered all that plot from the trailer but I was surprised and appalled as the movie progressed to find out just how devious Walter was. His lies grow exponentially and it's quite shocking to realize that you, as an audience member, have been taken in by this man just like Margaret. It is also delightful to cheer for Margaret as she gradually realizes what a corner she has painted herself into (pun intended) and starts to make her way out. Amy Adams is unsurprisingly fantastic and she makes you root for Margaret all the way through this movie. This is a woman who could be frustratingly naive, yet Adams' portrayal, Tim Burton's careful direction, and the thoughtful script by Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander help you understand all of her motivations and how she was manipulated into this terrible position. There's a fair amount of social commentary, showcasing how women were told to stick to their proper sphere and be good wives and mothers with no ambitions of their own. Christoph Waltz is a brilliant villain, preening and pompous and buffoonish, yet still hilarious and weirdly credible. He and Adams play wonderfully off each other and it's easy to see how Margaret could have initially fallen for this man, only to then discover his petty lunacy. Perhaps the most startling thing about Big Eyes is how the more outrageous parts of the story are actually taken from real life. This is such a preposterous story that it turns out it just had to be true. 

Big Eyes is a fun, entertaining movie that has the ability to genuinely surprise you. It is bizarre and beautiful and chock full of great performances. Amy Adams deservedly won a Golden Globe and while the movie may not win any more awards by virtue of being more of a comedy than a drama, it certainly deserves to be seen with the biggest eyes you have. 

Foxcatcher: Deeply Disturbing Drama

Foxcatcher was widely praised at the Cannes Film Festival last year, earning Bennett Miller the Best Director award. Steve Carell received a great deal of kudos for his portrayal of the immensely bizarre and enigmatic John E. du Pont, a dramatic turn that is a complete departure from anything you've ever seen him in. Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum are equally magnificent as Dave and Mark Schultz, the brothers who won gold medals at the 1984 Olympics and came to du Pont's attention when he decided to start a wrestling team. Based on actual events, Foxcatcher tells a deeply weird and unsettling story, but the way in which it is told may undermine your actual enjoyment of the movie.

The movie opens with Mark Schultz, shortly after his Olympic win. Mark is dedicated to the sport of wrestling, but he isn't a great public speaker or natural-born leader like his much more charismatic brother, Dave. Mark is struggling to support himself, and his dream to win another gold at the 1988 Seoul Olympics seems impossible. Enter John E. du Pont, heir to the Du Pont family fortune and more eccentric than any fictional millionaire you've seen. Du Pont doesn't know anything about wrestling but has inexplicably decided he wants to become a wrestling coach and lead Team USA to victory at the World Championships and Olympics. He woos Mark to come live on his sprawling Foxcatcher Farm estate and start training a team at the wrestling facility he has established there. Flattered by the attention, Mark tries to establish himself as a successful trainer. Unfortunately, he is just not as capable as his brother, and under du Pont's dubious guidance, things quickly take a turn for the worse.

You may or may not know how this story ends. I had some idea, though not the precise details, so I spent two hours waiting to see the thing happen that I vaguely knew would happen and in the meantime wondering what on earth was actually happening on screen. Foxcatcher is mainly a psychological drama that tries to get inside these characters' heads and find an explanation for the abrupt occurrence at the very end. But the more it tries to make sense of these people, the more unclear their motivations become. Du Pont has mommy issues, megalomania, and a coke habit; Mark is impressionable, jealous of his older brother, and losing his way. Du Pont has money but he has no skill, while Mark is struggling to make money off his one great talent. Dave is the "normal" one, with a wife and kids, a good job, and a passion for his sport, which makes it all the more tragic when he gets recruited into the crazy world of Team Foxcatcher.

I didn't think I liked this movie when I saw it, but upon reflection, it is actually quite fascinating. The story beats drag on a bit, but the film presents some brilliant character studies and the actors are all doing some of their best work to date. The score is eerily perfect, raising goosebumps at various moments and reminding you that this is not a happy tale about achieving the American dream but instead a look at how that dream can go horribly wrong. I would have preferred a shorter movie, but then maybe it wouldn't have afforded me enough insight (or lack thereof) into these characters and their twisted psyches. Ultimately, we can never really understand these men, but Foxcatcher is an intriguing attempt to deconstruct them and present their disturbing story. 

Pride: Joyful and Uplifting

Pride is based on a very strange and wonderful true story out of 1980s Britain. A group of gay and lesbian activists decided to raise money to support Welsh miners who were striking to protest the harsh policies of the Thatcher-led Conservative government. The LGBT community had suffered a great deal under the Conservative opposition to gay rights, so they sympathized with the miners' struggles and thought it was only right to support their fellow sufferers under Tory rule. As you can imagine, miners aren't the most gay-friendly people on the planet but Pride outlines how these two very different communities united behind a common cause and developed a rather beautiful friendship.

The cast of characters includes Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer), the outspoken gay man who comes up with the idea of creating LGSM (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners); his friend, Mike Jackson (Joe Gilgun) who supports him when everyone else thinks it's an insane idea; Gethin Roberts (Andrew Scott) who runs the gay bookshop that LGSM operates out of; his partner, Jonathan Blake, a flamboyant actor (Dominic West, as you've never seen him before, in a simply sublime role); the young Joe Copper (George MacKay) who is not out to his parents but inadvertently becomes a part of LGSM and is cautiously finding his foothold in the gay community; and the one lesbian, Steph Chambers (Faye Marsay), though a few more do join the group later on. Together, they represent quite a range in terms of life experience and level of self-acceptance, but they become a close-knit family as they strive to make LGSM a success.

Initially unable to find a miner's union that will accept money from an LGBT group, they cold-call the tiny Welsh mining village of Onllwyn and become allied with this remote community. Paddy Considine plays Dai Donovan, the leader of the striking miners in Onllwyn, and after getting over the surprise that these donations are coming from a group of gay people, he quickly proves himself to be a faithful ally to his new friends. He and Mark believe in the same philosophy that people need to put aside their differences and support each other for the common good, and he is fully grateful for LGSM's aid. But when Dai and his Committee members invite LGSM to their village to thank them for their support, there is of course plenty of controversy. The more conservative members of the village are pitted against the more empathetic folk who make up the Committee, and things get off to a shaky start. However, after a rousing evening of disco dancing and general camaraderie, the villagers start to wonder if these gays and lesbians might not be so bad after all. The movie is by no means looking at the world through rose-colored glasses: there is plenty of opposition, prejudice, and heartbreaking pigheadedness to endure; yet it somehow retains a constantly uplifting and joyous tone, a promise of the changes to come and the gradual dawning of a new day for both the mining unions and the LGBT community.

Writer Stephen Beresford and director Matthew Warchus have put together a stunning movie about the ability of people to empathize and evolve to love and support their fellow humans. The Onllwyn Committee members are played by British stalwarts like Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton, and they all do a wonderful job of portraying how different people can approach the topic of gayness with clumsy kindness and eventual acceptance. Some elements of the story are more predictable than others, and a fair amount of cinematic liberties are taken to dramatize key moments. Yet I was astonished and thrilled to learn how much of this story was actually true.

Pride is a truly triumphant tale, all the more impressive because it never gets too sanctimonious or treacly. It doesn't hide the dangers the LGSM members faced against the rampant homophobia prevalent at the time, but it shows how much they still managed to achieve through sheer force of will and goodness. We definitely need more stories like this.