Three Kings (1999)

Today's film is Three Kings.  Is it a war drama, a comedy, or social commentary?  Maybe it is all three!  At the end of the Gulf War in the early 1990s, 4 soldiers set about to retrieve some stolen gold.  And they get it fairly quickly about 35 minutes into the film.  The hard part will be getting the gold where it needs to go.

As they already trying to transfer the gold, the people of the region keep needing their assistance.  Pesky people and their constant need for help!  The soldiers do the right thing and help the citizens, putting their needs over the desire for gold.  There is a lot of commentary over the real reasons we went over there, as well as the current state the area is in.  Nothing that we don't already know, but  remember this film was made before Junior Bush sent troops to Iraq and reopened old wounds.  In a sense, this film could have been set more recently and we would not have seen much difference.  I will give this an 8/10.

Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) (2007)

Today's film is Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).  At first I wondered what a diving bell had anything to do with a butterfly.  Butterflies don't go underwater.  But as I watched the film, I saw that it was a metaphor a man had created for his body and his life.  An extraordinary event changed him forever and trapped him.

Jean-Dominique Bauby (Jean-Do to his friends) was once a promising editor at the glitzy fashion magazine Elle, based in France.  For some unknown reason, he suffered a stroke at the young age of 43 which attacked the function of his brain stem.  The doctors described it as locked-in syndrome and told him it was a very rare occurrence which trapped him inside his own body.  Jean-Do no longer had function of any part of his body.  He couldn't walk, move his arms, turn his head, nothing.  The first part of the film is shown through Jean-Do's point of view, as he discovers what is going on.  He is sad to learn he can no longer talk.  His brain functions work perfectly fine, as he can still think.  So even though he is awake and completely aware of what is going on around him, he really can't interact with the world.

Jean-Do's super hot speech therapist, Henriette, teaches him how to communicate using the only control he has: blinking his left eye.  The doctor had to sew up his right eye because he couldn't blink.  If he didn't, then it would dry up and get infected.  Henriette tells Jean-Do to try to tell her something.  She uses a series of letters, and he blinks when he hears the letter he wants, spelling out his words. He spells out "I want to Die".  Henriette is shocked and insulted because she is trying to help him, but I can't blame him.  He can't move or anything.  Poor guy can't even use the bathroom.  He's not really living, he's being kept alive by other people and artificial means.  He's moved around by people everywhere, in the pool, in a wheelchair, all to prevent bedsores and exercise him, and he's fed by a feeding tube.

I wonder if he would have benefited by learning Morse code with his blinking eye.

After a while, Jean-Dodecides to write a book about his plight.  He originally wanted to write a book based on The Count of Monte Cristo, that book we were forced to read in high school.  But he wants to tell his own story.  He feels he is trapped in his own body, like a big diving bell, unable to move himself and just floating along down in the ocean.  But, like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, his spirit breaks free from his useless body and he finds happiness.   He called his book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

There are so many beautiful moments in this movie as Jean-Do basically lives in his imagination.  Ten days after the book was published, Jean-Do passed on from pneumonia.  He was never able to break free from his body in real life.  I found this film to be inspiring and powerfully sad.  Nobody deserves a fate like Jean-Do, to see the world pass him by and not be allowed to join in.  I will give this film a 9 out of 10.

Rain Man (1988)

Earlier, I watched this exciting Ted Talk about this guy and his performance in a memory competition.  Apparently memory competitions are a thing.  He trained with Kim Peek, the man who inspired Rain Man.  He is autistic and has the ability to memorize entire phone books.  Everything the character (played by Dustin Hoffman) could do, he did.  It was amazing to learn about someone with such great powers of memory.  It was said that people like him store their memories in a different area of the brain than most people.  They store random facts (like phone books) in the part of the brain that hosts location (places and landscapes) memory.  So, if we can remember a beach we visited long ago, they remember full calendars and schedules.

So, now I know that the Rain Man is a real person!

So, in the film, we first meet Charlie, who is played by Tom Cruise.  He is a shady car dealer who owes a great deal of money to someone.  When he dad passes, he returns home, hoping to claim a huge inheritance. To his shock, he doesn't get any money, instead he gets his dad's prized car!  The very car that sparked the argument with his dad that lead to them hating each other! This is his dad's final "go fuck yourself" from the afterlife.

Charlie tracks down the money to an institute, where it now belongs to his older brother, Raymond.  Charlie didn't even know he had a brother!  Raymond is an autistic savant that lives by a strict routine.  How can he cope when Charlie takes him away from his home at the institute?

Charlie is forced to drive all the way to California because Raymond refuses to fly.  He has studied the amount of fatal crashes each airline has, and concluded driving is safer.  There is no explaining to him that flying is actually the safest option.  Remember at the end, he travels by train, too.  Trains are really fast and fun (also relaxing).  

Throughout the film, Raymond's quirks irritate Charlie to no end.  But soon he learns that Raymond has an amazing gift for math and memorization.  So, he does the logical thing and lets him win big at a casino.  During filming  Dustin Hoffman (who played Raymond) would wander off to play blackjack and had to have someone watch him so he would stop.

As Charlie gets to know Raymond, his attitude changes.  This is the first time he's spent with his brother that no one told him he had.  He learns that Raymond is the "Rain Man" who used to sing lullabies to him when he was little.  Rain Man was simply how he pronounced Raymond.  Later, Raymond's caretakers track them down and demand him back.  Now, Charlie is less concerned about the money and more concerend about losing his brother again.  He realizes that Raymond being in the stable environment where he knows his caretakers would be the best thing.  Raymond boards a train with them to return home, but not before saying goodbye to his "main man Charlie".

Both Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman did exceptional jobs portraying their characters.  That really made the difference in this film.  I will rate this a 9/10.

My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown (1989)

The most stereotypical Irish family of all time, except one of their hundreds of children happens to have cerebral palsy. This is his story.  The movie itself felt quite inspiring, and Daniel Day-Lewis did a fantastic acting job even with the completely predictable plot. I give it an 8/10.