Reviewing Movies

Bike messengers tooling around New York City at 25-30 mph on bikes with no brakes and hard geared with no coast mechanism. A messenger bag over the shoulder and a bike lock chain around the waist. A helmet and possibly knee and elbow pads their only protection. The hazards carelessly opened car doors, unsignalled lane changes and abrupt turns and kamikaze pedestrians. All this for $80/day or about $20,000/year if you stay healthy. If it's got to get there a bike messenger can do the job faster than any other service.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has no less than four stand-ins. A real-life bike messenger adept at negotiating city traffic at speed, a bike racer, a stunt bike rider and a pro-stunt man for the dangerous accident scenes. All have physiques to match his lean compact frame. The DVD Supplements that demonstrate how the action was captured are a must-see. There are no high-octane chase scenes à la Fast and Furious but the kinetic energy of an unprotected human body captured close-up on a bike travelling up to 40 mph in traffic is quite dramatic.

The movie is special effects laden. The storyline is all about getting there as fast as possible. As portrayed these riders have a lifestyle but no life and therein lies the film's weakness.

To Kill a Mockingbird was shot in 1960-1 in B&W. It’s remarkable how one brings who one is and one’s life experience to what one reads and watches. Every time I watch a movie such as this I make new discoveries. The opening credits show Scout outlining the title by rubbing a crayon over a woodcut followed by continued doodles on the same sheet of lined paper. As the credits begin the box of treasures she opens is Jem’s which seems rather odd. A series of those childhood keepsakes are scrolled past as the credits appear. Many are gifts left them by ‘Boo’ Radley. The carved figures, a broken pocket watch, a whistle, various marbles....

Atticus Finch is a remarkable man who in the first place allows his children to call him by his first name. He treats everyone including his black housekeeper/nanny as equals and in all his dealings never raises his voice. Just why his wife died when Scout was two I don’t remember reading. Two scenes stand out for me. Jem’s wide-eyed wonder when a father who refuses to allow him to have a gun is asked by the Sheriff as the best shot in the county to shoot a rabid dog. It harkens to a past to which we are never privy. And the second involves Scout defusing the lynch mob by asking one of the ring leaders to say hello to his son Walter for her. The innocence of youth.

The miss-carriage of justice which is at the centre of this tome is matched by the judicial discretion shown by Sheriff Tate in the closing scenes. The role of Calpurnia, the children’s governess and housekeeper in shaping their lives and attitudes with their father’s approval cannot be understated. These children are truly colourblind even if their neighbours aren’t. I only wish the injustice and institutional racism this story serves to spotlight were a historical artifact. The movie is not only one of the ten best of 1962 but of all time.

2015

I just rewatched this movie in light of the fact that I'd just finished reading Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman. There has been a lot of shock expressed about the role of Atticus Finch in the latest book. I would remind anyone who is looking at that book in light of the movie I've just seen that the movie is told from the naive point of view of a 6-year-old girl. Atticus defends his client against a white society that has falsely accused him. If the man we meet decades later belongs to a white supremacist organization he wouldn't be the first person to join such a group the better to keep track of what his neighbours are up to. In Ontario Environmentalist groups divide up the political parties among themselves and each join one for much the same purpose.