Kick-Back Friday: August 2010 Archives

Winter's Bone

(2010): An unusual KBF recommendation, solely because the movie is still in theaters. Winner of this year's Sundance Grand Jury Prize, Winter's Bone, based on the novel of the same name, is the story of a poverty-level teenager in the Ozarks, who searches for her meth-producing, bail-jumping father, while sustaining a fragile, nuclear family.

Inevitable comparisons are to be made with the superior Frozen River of 2008 (another Sundance winner), which was carried with greater skill by a truly exceptional (and considerably more mature) leading actress (Melissa Leo). But Winter's Bone is still worth the price of theater admission, even if one is to endure the likely distraction of popcorn munchers. In fact, consider your crude company part of the Sensorama experience.

In addition to Jennifer Lawrence in the lead role (who's probably getting more adulation than she deserves for her performance), Winter's Bone features veteran supporting actor John Hawkes of "Deadwood" fame and a nearly unrecognizable Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer of "Twin Peaks") in a very bit part.

Night Train to Munich (1940): A rakish UK operative (Rex Harrison) goes undercover in Germany to rescue a kidnapped Czech scientist and his daughter from the Nazi regime. Paul Henreid, aka Paul von Hernried, plays a duplicitous Axis bad guy two years before his iconic role as a WW2 resistance leader in Casablanca. Directed by Carol Reed.

Bob le Flambeur (1956): Another notable film of the disaffected criminal subculture from Jean-Pierre Melville, director of the similarly themed Le Cercle Rouge and Classe Tous Risque. When Bob, an inveterate gambler, suffers an extended streak of bad luck, he recruits a small group of friends to crack open a casino safe. But in the immediate buildup to the heist, Bob gets sidetracked by his addiction...with ironic results. French actor Roger Duchesne, as Bob, carries the film with perfect platinum coolness.

In 1971, Pentagon insider Daniel Ellsberg leaked a top-secret study, aka the Pentagon Papers, to the press. The mammoth document demonstrated the high-level, systematic deceit of multiple administrations to escalate the war in Vietnam, and the press predictably gobbled it up. Ellsberg's treacherous act and its aftermath were chronicled on film in last year's Academy Award-nominated The Most Dangerous Man in America, which is now on DVD.

And while the documentary isn't particularly original in its execution or perspective on Ellsberg's derring-do, it does show (perhaps inadvertently) just how compromised a character must become before he can morph into a historic whistleblower. Think of the initially Koolaid-guzzling characters of Big Tobacco's Jeffrey Wigand and, to a lesser extent, ADM's Mark Whitacre, but on much more expansive stage in a much more explosive era, and you've got an idea of what Ellsberg was and is all about. The steeper the slide into moral ambiguity, the more dramatic the atonement and, god knows, the lengthier the proselytizing.

And if you want to see Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wrestle with his role in the Vietnam War, watch the life-sucking The Fog of War (2004).