Tag: film reviews

George Bailey on the Bridge

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl
Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life," about to jump off the bridge.
In the fallow days of late December, I watched many holiday movies with my kids. The choices weren’t adventurous: Rudolph, Elf, The Polar Express. Between viewings of Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and Home Alone 3, The Grinch played no fewer than eight times. My daughters capitalized on their parents’ exhaustion. Their baby brother had just come home from the hospital, and this was turning out better than we’d warned—less screaming, more TV.

But even on vacation there are limits. Instead of Home Alone 4, I insisted we watch an old gem, a movie I remembered fondly from childhood. Everyone loves It’s a Wonderful Life, I declared. It’s a real Christmas classic.

You can probably guess where this is going. Did my daughters (aged five and eight) love It’s a Wonderful Life? They tolerated it. But I felt amazed by what I saw, wrung out, on the verge of tears for the whole last hour.

It’s a Wonderful Life (which, as every appreciation notes three paragraphs in, you should really watch if you haven’t) is a fantasy about contingency. The story is wrapped in holiday gauze and told through intricate flashbacks, but at its heart is George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart in his everyman mode. By the film’s third act, George wants to jump off a bridge and end it all. To stop him, a guardian angel shows him how horrible his town, Bedford Falls, would be if he had never been born. This vision causes George to realize his mistake. He returns to the bridge and prays, “Please, God, I want to live again!” And—poof!—back to the real world. In the end, George reunites with his wife and children, surrounded by friends who have rallied to his aid.

Why does a movie like that work? The brief description sounds like inspirational bunk, and many appreciations—including a surprising number praising the film’s depiction of fractional reserve banking—fail to capture what’s most effective about it. For me, what makes the film work is that when George reaches the bridge, we’re there too. We understand why he wants to jump.

George Bailey’s life is not the life he wanted. Read more »

Monday, July 24, 2023

Movie Review: “Oppenheimer”

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar (Warning: Spoilers ahead)

Reviewing biopics is tricky. On one hand, if you are someone informed about the facts, it’s easy to bring a scalpel and dissect every fact and character in minute detail, an exercise that will almost always lead to a critical and often negative view of a film. On the other hand, knowing that a movie is a medium of expression defined a certain way, one has to allow for creative license and some convenient omissions and embellishments that would be unforgivable in a documentary or historically accurate drama. Thus, the best way to review biopics in my opinion is a middle path, making allowance for artistic interpretations and changes of fact while still holding the movie maker up to high standards in terms of making sure that these changes don’t fundamentally distort the soul of the narrative.

I went into Christopher Nolan’s 3-hour extravaganza keeping this middle ground in mind. Having just written an eight-part series about Oppenheimer and been familiar with his life and work for a fairly long time, I approached the film with fairly high expectations. And I have to say that I was impressed. If one simple metric of a high-quality film is its ability to keep you glued to your seat for 3 hours, “Oppenheimer” delivers in spades. Much of this effect comes from Nolan’s judiciously assembled direction and from outstanding performances by key characters that keep the audience riveted. “Oppenheimer” is an Oliver Stone-like jigsaw puzzle, breathlessly switching between timelines, black and white scenes and pithy character lines interspersed with artistic imagery of crackling jolts of electricity, the shimmer of particles and waves and imagined operatic scenes of stars that signify the deep scientific reality behind our everyday world. Key aspects of the Trinity test like the assembly of the bomb and the details of the fireball are accurately rendered. But first and foremost, it is a drama about J. Robert Oppenheimer. Read more »