Vantage Point

Gripping. Chilling.

An entertaining style - rewinding the story multiple times, starting again from a different perspective, at 3 second after 12 noon, tying it all together in the end. I wondered how many more times they would rewind. But a mostly satisfying method.

I loved it and was thoroughly entertained.

Dennis Quaid skillfully portrays a secret service agent who once took a bullet for the president, and now, back on line, to speak, is doubted by some of his colleagues if he's got what it takes. He's not too sure, either.

The bad guys aren't so bad, just determined, and that's an intelligent and honest way of portraying reality - we like to demonize the enemy, paint them in ugly pictures, and in so doing, over-react, or react as they would have us, playing into their game, as the President suggests when tempted by aids to unleash a little firepower. "We're better than that," he says. Oh to have a President like that!

A varied cast with lots of twist and turns to the plot.

Forrest Whitacker is superb, but then he always is, playing an American tourist taking a break from family troubles, in the right place at the right time.

Great car chases and crashes ... filming that magnifies the intensity of the story. I don't recall the music; I presume there was some. I think that's a good thing for this kind of story.

A hint of politics here and there - a president who wants to build bridges rather than burn them - imagine that?

A top-rated entertainment. See it and have fun! Lots of fireworks!

The Great Debaters

Far better than I had anticipated.

I was expecting another "feel good" story - not that I dislike such stories. To the contrary, I love them.

It was clearly a "feel good" story about the little school that could, but so much more. The film conveys the utter cruelty of the Jim Crow laws and life in the south when an African American lived with the fear of lynching.

Rather than just a "feel good" story, we learn about the world in which greatness emerges, a world of terror and intimidation. My only caveat about the film occurs here - the interface between the story of racism in the deep south and the "feel good" part of them is a little ragged in places, but aside from this minor detraction, hats off to the folks who made the film.

The story of racism in American and in the deep south is a painful one, a story we're still living, a story not yet fully resolved.

Part of it's persistence is the simple convenience of having a cast system: "For even for the lowest white man, the most destitute and beaten down, there was always someone a little lower, someone on whom they could pick, someone to terrorize, someone to lynch and burn."

Here's a piece alluded to in the movie:

Lynching is the illegal execution of an accused person by a mob. The term lynching probably derived from the name of Charles Lynch (1736-96), a justice of the peace who administered rough justice in Virginia. Lynching was originally a system of punishment used by whites against African American slaves. However, whites who protested against this were also in danger of being lynched. On Novembe 7, 1837, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, editor of the Alton Observer was killed by a white mob after he had published articles criticizing lynching and advocating the abolition of slavery. It is estimated that between 1880 and 1920, an average of two African Americans a week were lynched.

A fine film, a dramatic story, a "feel good" film with a whole lot more.