The American President

After touring the White House last Saturday I just had to watch this movie. I also hadn't seen this one in years but not because of a broken VCR (as I had this film on VHS) but due to the real life consequences of September 11th. Before then I liked to pop this movie in every chance I got, a distinction only held by my Star Trek movies.

Anyway I popped this movie in as soon as I returned from Washington, DC. This was a good movie. It was written by West Wing creator and scribe Aaron Sorkin. It was basically a political movie with a romantic comedy plot.

Now consider this. The year was 1995 and I can't say that the President we had at that time exactly made me proud, but Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) was a President I can look up to. Yeah he was a Democrat but he wasn't a bad leader (and that's only because he was written that way). All the same I loved the discussion of policy in this film.

Then he meets Sidney Ellen Wade (Annette Benning) who visits the White House as part of her job. Then she catches the eye of the leader of the free world and the most of the film has him juggling his duties as President as well as maintaining a romantic relationship with a woman whose job it was to get tough with him in the first place.

In the course of this movie the President is pounded by a Republican Senator (Richard Dreyfuss) who wants to take his job. By the end of this movie the President rips the Senator a new one and just as he starts to lose momentum, he regains it by the time the movie ends at the state of the union.

This is a great movie and it without a doubt gives you that great patriotic feeling. Even if you may not like the fact that the President has a girlfriend or that she might spend a night at the White House.

Boyz N the Hood

Another movie I haven't seen in a while. This is one of those message movies we hear about. This movie is about a group of friends two are fairly decent and the other had spent time in the pen. We start with them very young and then we see them later as a group of teenagers.

There are a number of issues present in this film. Teenage sex, gentrification, gang violence, father & son relationships, to name those that I can easily identify. But there is one issue that I'd like to talk about.

Doughboy (Ice Cube) and Ricky (Morris Chestnutt) are brothers. However, their mother had them by two different fathers. Because Doughboy's father wasn't liked much by his mother she doesn't like Doughboy much. She tells how he won't amount to nothing and he isn't going to be "shit". She talks him down good. When Ricky gets killed near the end she blames Doughboy. It may be as much about his criminal lifestyle but it may just be a symptom of how differently she treats her boys.

The best part of this movie was the relationship between Furious (Laurence Fishburne) and his son Tre (Cuba Gooding, Jr.). At the beginning he was living with his mother but as per a "contractual agreement" he acts up in class and gets sent to live with his father. The idea here is that only a man (preferably his father) can teach a young boy to be a man. The difference between Tre and say Doughboy was that he had a father to teach him some responsibility. And what this kid got from his father showed. Apparently he's the only man raising a child on his block in South Central Los Angeles.

I was astonished to find out on Wikipedia that Boyz N The Hood was deemed culturally significant by the Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in National Film Registry back in 2002. The director John Singleton did an excellent job in this film.

Mississippi Burning

It has been ages since I've seen that movie. The only copy I have is on VHS (I know some of you are thinking...What's that?). Well I've yet to upgrade to DVD for this film which is basically about those three civil rights workers killed near Philadelphia, Mississippi in the 1960s.

Gene Hackman plays an FBI agent who grew up in Mississippi. Willem DaFoe plays an FBI agent who probably never saw a southern state before in his life before he was assigned to the setting of this movie, Jessup County (which doesn't exist, the name of the town was probably changed to protect the innocent). This was something of a thriller but a great period piece.

A lot of what you see is going to upset, hopefully, a great number of you. This is one documentation of the struggle for freedom in a free nation. A people who were free in theory still having to fight for their freedom. The thing is these people were afraid to fight for their freedom. It seems the authorities have a vested interest in suppressing the freedom of a certain group of people.

Either way it's great to see the FBI get their men. Some of those guys who were smiling when they got arrested weren't smiling when it was done. When the FBI arrived some of them knew what time it was. Indeed one tried to run. Either way it was one victory in a very interesting era.

BTW, they recently reopened the case and someone did indeed get convicted after almost 40 years. Also I had seen this movie in the theaters. However this cineplex is no longer open, it used to be close to where a movie theater is now on Illinois street in about the Streeterville neighborhood.