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Year: 2017

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: A BOLO for Justice

Guest blogger extraordinaire Bill Clark Writer-director Martin McDonagh’s film, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), takes us along Mildred Hayes’ journey as she deals with the unsolved murder-rape of her teenage daughter. Brilliantly played by Frances McDormand, bereaved mother, Mildred, decides to take on the avuncular police chief Bill Willoughby  (played by Woody Harrelson), after a year of apparent police inattention). She pays for three road-side billboards with provocative Burma Shave-like titles asking for justice from Chief Willoughby. The billboards trigger a chain of...

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The Beguiled–Bewitched and Possessed

  In Sophia Coppola’s reinterpretation of the 1971 Clint Eastwood film by the same name, The Beguiled opens with an eleven-year-old girl gathering mushrooms in her straw basket deep in a quiet wood in Virginia. Conjuring an image of Little Red Riding Hood soon coming upon a big bad wolf, we see her discover the wounded John McBurney (Colin Farrell), a Union soldier in the midst of the Civil War. The child decides to take him back to her girls’ boarding school. Headmistress Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) is reluctant but feels a moral obligation to tend to him. Edwina (Kirsten...

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Lady Bird– A Girl’s Flight from Home

by Guest Blogger Bill Clark, photographer, mixed media artist, and fellow movie fiend “Lady Bird” should have another title. For those of us who remember LBJ’s wife, nicknamed Lady Bird, this title confuses a potential audience.] Greta Gerwig (first-time director and screenwriter,) takes us on the journey of seventeen-year-old Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, brilliantly played by Saoirse Ronan (of Brooklyn fame; see my review of March 1, 2016 ) , as she navigates parent-child dynamics and the social complexities of her Catholic high school upbringing in Sacramento, California....

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Mudbound–Mired in the Mississippi Delta

  Set in the Deep South in1939 and then fast-forwarding to World War II, Mudbound is an epic of two families–one white (McAllan) and one black (Jackson)–who are severely constrained by the Jim Crow laws and customs in Alabama. The two McAllan brothers, Henry and Jamie, epitomize Cain and Abel. The Jacksons are sharecroppers bravely facing the disconnect between their dreams and the dangerous obstacles set before them. Mudbound‘s main plot focuses on Jamie McAllan (Garrett Hedland) and Ronsel Jackson (Jason Mitchell), decorated war heroes who, upon returning, are misfits...

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Goodbye Christopher Robin – The Story Behind Winnie the Pooh

Guest Blogger, Mary Marcus, is a movie lover and enthusiastic reviewer. Repressed feelings and isolation are channeled through writing what would be a children’s classic about a young boy and his animal friends in this historical drama, Goodbye Christopher Robin. England after the First World War had rigid social rules and manners for the upper class, in an affectless culture. A.A. Milne came back from the war broken but unable to talk about the trauma he experienced. A writer (of the beloved Winnie the Pooh series) and playwright, Milne (played by Domhnall Gleeson of Revenant), experiencing...

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