Movie review: Flight

Movie Review: Flight

Flight; Robert Zemeckis, director; Paramount; 2012

Starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Greenwood, Don Cheadle, Tamara Tunie, Nadine Velazquez

By GALE CADY WILLIAMS

Director Robert Zemeckis’ Oscar-nominated 2012 film Flight could have been just another action-on-a-jet movie, like many that have gone before it, anchored by action hero stars such as Harrison Ford, Nicholas Cage, and Samuel L. Jackson. Much to the credit of star Denzel Washington and director Zemeckis, it is far better than that although, based on Zemeckis’ previous hits with the Back to the Future films, Forest Gump, and Cast Away, we could reasonably expect a film that is a top-level action movie entertainment. And in large part, it is that, but it is also far more.

Flight also marks what may be the very best performance in a career’s worth of outstanding performances by Denzel Washington, whose pilot character Whip Whitaker is a cocky, confident, high-performing, risk-taking, cocaine-snorting alcoholic superhero with a failed marriage, an angry teenaged son, and a bad history with women.

At first, we think this will be a high-octane action movie, although clues as to the ultimate nature of the film are laid in the opening scene. As the film opens, we watch Whip Whitaker and his sexual partner (Nadine Velazquez) wake up naked (in a surprisingly risqué sequence for Washington), hear him argue with his ex-wife, and watch him snort cocaine and drink from the hotel room mini bar before he suits up for his flight. We watch him in uniform as he walks that confident, cocky Denzel athlete’s walk down the sidewalk tunnel at the airport, and we know he’s in control even though we know he’s high. Because we’ve seen him get high, our fears for his well-being and that of his passengers are confirmed as we watch the plane piloted by Washington’s character hit a violent storm. Only through the pilot’s skill and audacity are the plane and its 104 passengers spared from death through a series of jet-fighter stunt moves Whip Whitaker makes, including flipping the plane upside down as terrified passengers scream in their seats, and parts begin to literally fall off the aging jet. Ultimately the plane’s landing gear totally fail, yet the pilot skillfully lands in a field near a church, causing the death of two crewmembers and two passengers, including a flight attendant who was the pilot’s date from the night before. The crash sequence is shot almost in real time, bringing viewers to the edge of their seats as we cheer for the pilot.

That’s the first half of the film.

The remainder of the film centers on how Washington’s character deals with the questions coming at him from the Federal Aviation Commission, fellow pilots, and the adulation from the public and attempts to confront and conquer his unacknowledged alcoholism. His airline hires a top-notch defense attorney (the always incredible Don Cheadle) who presents a case that could ultimately clear the pilot, even up against a tough interrogator from the FCC (Oscar winner Melissa Leo) in the trial that follows the crash.

I won’t give away how things unravel at the end, but I would have been very disappointed in Denzel Washington and Robert Zemeckis if the film had opted for a predictable ending. The final scene is a bit of a disappointment, given the quality of the rest of the film; it feels a bit tacked-on and false.

Denzel Washington’s face in the very emotional close-ups in the film reflects the actor’s skill in conveying layers of emotions that speak volumes for his character’s grief, remorse, and bitterness; if he doesn’t win this year’s Best Actor award, it will only be because Hugh Jackman broke our hearts in Les Miserables.
Performances worth noting here, in addition to Cheadle’s, are Bruce Greenwood as Whip’s longtime and loyal pilot friend, now a member of the FAC investigating team, and Tamara Tunie as Whip’s experienced flight attendant friend, Margaret.

Rating for this film (out of four stars): ✩✩✩✩

My Blizzard of ’78 story

January 27, 2013
WTVN TV Channel 10 weatherman Chris Bradley asked us to share our Blizzard of ’78 stories; today is the 35th anniversary of that landmark weather day. 
Here’s mine:
I was 8 months pregnant, and woke up to the sound of thunder and our old house rattling like Grendl was at the door. I went to the dining room windows and saw snow flying sideways in 60-plus mph winds at the windows, and feared they would break from the fearsome force coming at them. I was terrified that I would go into early labor, but luckily, that did not happen. When the blizzard was finished, we had snow up nearly to the top of our back door and snow so deep down the street in front of our house that a normal-sized person could not walk in it, because it was chest-high. Fortunately, we had a huge fireplace in our living room, which had a sofa bed as well as French doors that closed it off from the rest of the house. We lived in there for 3 days, when our power came back on, cooking in the fireplace like old-fashioned pioneers. After the roads cleared, which in my memory took two weeks, we took a drive through the nearby countryside and were astounded at the terrifying 7- to 12-foot walls of snow along the sides; it was like a sci-fi novel of a frozen planet. On the first truly warm day when teachers and students were all back to school and the roads were clear and the landscape had started to look normal again (at least for winter in Ohio), in the middle of a thaw with water dripping and running everywhere, my son, my first child Nicholas was born two weeks after his due date. 
We have always joked that he had been waiting for that first warm day all along.

Film review: ‘Looper'

Film review: Looper
January 1, 2013

You know I am a sci-fi and time-travel nut. Huge fan of all things Time travel. So here is an official sign I am not as hip as I once was: 

A review in today’s online USA Today proclaims Looper to be the home video find of the year; I wish I could agree with this. Sadly, I chose this film as our New Year’s Eve movie, and I, too, had thought it would be great, considering it has Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and time travel, all in one movie. But the violence in it, which includes scenes of torture, made me physically and emotionally ill and gave me nightmares - not a good way to welcome in the New Year.

One film that immediately comes to mind as comparable is A Clockwork Orange: a good thing for the current film and its director, Rian Johnson (who has directed episodes of Breaking Bad, so I should have been forewarned), but not for those of us who cannot abide scenes of rape and torture in a film. I have tried to watch A Clockwork Orange three times and have never gotten past the rape scene, and I’ve officially called off even intending to try to finish this film. 

Like the violent, sadistic and surreal Stanley Kubrick film, Looper is visually stunning and has an interesting and well-executed premise, but it is definitely not for the faint of heart or those of us who are very empathetic (like me). (I wince in pain when others describe painful accidents and dental procedures; no way I could be a medical practitioner of any kind.)

The Gannett critic said, “Looper - One of the better-reviewed, pleasant surprises of 2012, this smart and thoroughly convincing sci-fi thriller is just the sort of movie Hollywood needs to focus on making far more than it does.”

I would agree... If one can endure watching a killer stalk and kill children (this is especially unnerving after Sandy Hook), a demonic child, scenes of torture in which a “doctor” hacks off various essential pieces of a living man and then pours the lake of blood off a gurney, a head that actually explodes, flying bloody body parts, and almost as much blood as a Martin Scorcese film.

The special effects, plot, and particularly, the acting by Emily Blunt and Gordon-Levitt, as well as the demonic child played by 7-year-old Pierce Gagnon, are award-worthy, and Jeff Daniels, as a brutal gang leader in a role that is a departure for him, is convincingly heartless. Gordon-Levitt plays an assassin assigned to take down his future self, so some scenes of violence are obviously necessary, but much of the most graphic elements could have been omitted without damaging the story or the suspense.

I question why the director felt the need to include scenes reminiscent of the aforementioned A Clockwork Orange, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Gangs of New York, when the story is so strong that it does not need these scenes to keep us involved. 

If being a hipster means we are not bothered by extreme physical violence, torture, blood and the cold-blooded murder of children, then, I am officially uncool. So be it. 

Passions of the moment: The Night before Thanksgiving, when all through the house....

Passions of the moment: The Night before Thanksgiving, when all through the house....

Passions of the moment: The Night before Thanksgiving, when all through the house....

Passions of the moment: The Night before Thanksgiving, when all through the house....

The Night before Thanksgiving, when all through the house....

Today is the day before Thanksgiving, and as has been the case for many years, I am getting ready to make the food I will be taking to share to my family’s Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. I think I have only had one Thanksgiving dinner at my own home in all the years I have had a home of my own, but that is all right with me; I don’t mind packing it up to take along.

This year, as for the past few, I will be making homemade mashed potatoes with Asiago shredded cheese, sour cream and green onions, and two quarts of fresh cranberry relish (never the goo in a jar).

And also this year, I am acutely missing my parents, Paul and Betty Cady. My father passed away on Dec. 28, 1993 (after hanging on, I have always been sure, so as not to ruin our Christmas that year). My mother died on Dec. 9, 2003. Losing both of my parents in December has transformed that month, which for me, has always been the most eventful of the year, heightened by the fact that two of my three children were born in December: Brian, on December 23, and Rachel, on December 18 (My son Nick was born on March 10). The two December births added emotional intensity to the month that always was the most spiritual and emotional month for me, because never has there been any other child who loved and believed and anticipated Santa Claus as much as I did. I quite literally could not sleep for weeks before Christmas in eager anticipation of the Christmas Eve visit from the jolly old elf, who I always hoped would bring me a myriad of miniature kitchen appliances and, with any luck, a baby doll hopefully dressed in pajamas or maybe, if I were really, really good, a Ginny doll with brown hair like my own. One particularly spectacular year, there was a play kitchen made of formed tin with a tiny, precious little silver plastic faucet that turned back and forth on its base, with working cupboard drawers and tiny elfin silverware made of silver plastic that nestled next to tiny tin plates.

Despite my parents’ passing, I still look forward to Thanksgiving dinner with family, even though the family that I celebrate it with is quite different now; we have my one son and his wife and their four children for the first time this year in a few years, since he no longer has to work on Thanksgiving, and my other son will be coming home as he always does, to join us for the day, along with my husband and my daughter. This year, as we have since my mother died, our only meal will be at my in-laws’ home, and we go only there without having to switch homes. However, the beautiful and meaningful traditions of thanks do not exist there, which is the thing I most mourn about the day; the loss of that taking of time for the ceremony of thanks.

This has made me examine the idea of rituals: do we need them? Yes, I think so. Sometimes we need to take stock of the things that we still have, and be thankful for them. There is a Cat Stevens song about that: “I’m Being Followed By A Moonshadow,” in which he ponders: “if I ever lose my hands, lose my plow, lose my land, Oh if I ever lose my hands, Oh if.... I won't have to work no more...What if I should lose my mouth? All my teeth, north and south? What if I should lose my mouth? Oh, well, I won’t have to talk no more.” There have been more than several years when one of us lost a job; Thanksgiving forced us to remind ourselves that despite that loss, there are still things to be thankful for.

My parents, and particularly my mother, made sure that there was a thanks ceremony; the good china, the silver, the Heisey goblets, and the white damask tablecloth, with candlesticks and candles that she could never bring herself to burn. In the last years before Mom died in 2003, when by then the five Cady children had expanded to 8 grandchildren and 5 husbands and wives, each of us had to sit down, be quiet, and go around the table as all 20 (plus a visitor or two) of us held hands and shared what we were each most thankful for. Every year, every person’s story was a little different: a new baby, a new job, a renewed perspective on the value of still having our loved ones, or just the chance to be together as a family once again. Then she led the family in a heartfelt prayer that came, always, from her heart. Before we began to eat, my father liked to lead us in a toast to family in his rich, wonderful, deep Welsh voice, the children with sparkling grape juice or cider to hold up in wine glasses, the rest of us with a glass of wine, and ever the emotional family man, he would inevitably get too emotional to finish it. The food was passed formally, hand to hand, placed in our best china bowls and platters. No one ate before my mother sat down, and after she had led us all in grace, the meal began, with all of us reminded of the most important thing in life: Family.

The story of how Billie Holiday's "Violets For My Furs" became my favorite love song

So, here is the story of how Billie Holiday's "Violets For My Furs" became my favorite love song. (This is another post that I actually wrote a while back, but I share it with my students perhaps partly to prove that I really am a writer.)
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In the category "I Freakin’ Love This Song": Violets For My Furs, by Billie Holiday

By Gale Cady Williams

Published in Spinner online music magazine, October 2010

Maybe it’s that I love violets. Maybe it’s the imagery of spring’s sweet violets juxtaposed against snow. Maybe it’s that this song was on the first mix tape that my then-future husband made for me soon after we met, with Billie Holiday's Lady in Satin on one side and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks on the other. (How could I help but marry a man who would give me that?) Then again, maybe it’s the crackling heartbreak in Billie Holiday’s voice that hooked me from the first time I heard the song, “Violets For My Furs.” 

On the 1958 Columbia album Lady in Satin, recorded not long before her death in July 1959, Billie’s voice was not what most critics regard as her best. Many purists dislike the album for the lush Ray Ellis orchestral backing, as opposed to the pared-down early jazz trio recordings of the 1930s and ‘40s. And yes, on this album, Billie's voice at age 43 carries the full testimony of years of drug abuse, hardship, and heartbreak twice her age in grief ­‑‑ and on no song more than Violets. Her once-lovely voice cracks at the highs and lows, but this only serves to underline the song’s powerful emotional impact and the Yeats’-like vivid imagery of the song, giving a crackled patina to the song's testimony to a longer life’s worth of heartache and the singer’s poignant joy at receiving rare spring wildflowers in December:

“You bought me violets for my furs, and there was April in that December. The snow drifted on the flowers and melted where it lay. You pinned the violets to my furs, and gave a lift to the crowds passing by. You smiled at me so sweetly, since then one thought occurs: That we fell in love completely the day that you bought me violets for my furs.”