Entertainment

Saturday night we watched Babel (2006,R) (ScreenIt! Review).  From ScreenIt!:

Various strangers' lives are affected and become intertwined by an act of violence.

I usually dig films like this, but this one not so much.  I give it 3 out of 5.

Tonight we finished watching World Trade Center (2006,PG-13) (ScreenIt! Review).  From ScreenIt!:

Family members worry about and rescuers try to find victims buried in the rubble following the attacks of 9/11 and subsequent collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

The depiction of the anguish of the families of the missing first responders was remarkable and  brought Lisa to tears.  Somehow I didn't care for Nicholas Cage's performance.  I give it 3 out of 5.

Last night we watched Children of Men (2006,R) (ScreenIt! Review).  From the Wikipedia:

Set in the United Kingdom of 2027, the film explores a grim world in which two decades of global human infertility have left humanity with less than a century to survive. Societal collapse, terrorism, and environmental destruction accompany the impending extinction, with the United Kingdom, perhaps the last functioning government, persecuting a seemingly endless wave of illegal immigrant refugees seeking sanctuary.

I'm surprised I hadn't heard of this one before.  It was fantastic.  I never would have guessed it was a "companion piece to Cuarón's Y tu mamá también."  You couldn't help but think of The Road and also 28 Days Later, and it was interesting for many of the same reasons...but also because so much of it felt so familiar...pervasive anti-immigrant sentiment, soldiers with German shepherds, hooded prisoners, etc.

I give it 5 out of 5.

Friday night we watched Alpha Dog (2007,R) (ScreenIt! Review).  From the ScreenIt! Review:

A group of wannabe suburban gangsters must deal with the repercussions of kidnapping an associate's 15-year-old brother.

This had potential (and it was interesting to learnt that it was based on a true story), but in the end it seemed kind of flat.  The most interesting part to me was the way the Jake Mazursky character pretty much left Truelove with no options.

I give it 3 out of 5.

Another race-related documentary film I watched today was Banished, from PBS' Independent Lens series.  From the Independent Lens site:

From the 1860s to the 1920s, towns across the U.S. violently expelled African American residents.

Today, these communities remain virtually all white.

As black descendants return to demand justice, BANISHED exposes the hidden history of racial cleansing in America.

At least 12 different counties in eight states banished their black populations. More than 4,000 black residents were expelled from their homes.

The film takes the approach of visiting four of the counties where this occurred, discussing the historical events as well as examining the towns today.  What it finds is that the counties remain almost completely white and that they are generally of two minds regarding blacks: either they still aren't welcome or they are (even though somehow that doesn't translate into any residents of color).  I tend to think about this kind of thing as being long ago in the distant past.  However, the film shows footage of  a visit to Forsyth County Georgia in 1987 (75 years after blacks were driven out) by a group of whites and blacks who planned to march in honor of MLK and in memory of what had happened in that county.  They were met by huge crowds of people from the KKK and other racist organizations who made it abundantly clear with signs, shouts, and even thrown rocks how unwelcome their visit was.  This was only twenty years ago.  It was also interesting to see the difficulty in coming to resolution about what happened...the conflict between the fact that these black folks basically had their land and property stolen when they were driven out long ago and the fact that the current owners were not the wrongdoers but rather just people who happened to buy land that at some point in the past was stolen.  Like the documentary about the Little Rock high school, this film left me depressed about where we came from and how far we apparently still have to go.

I give it 5 out of 5.