United 93

I think that this was probably one of the better movies we have seen so far.  That being said it was understandably hard to watch.  There are many things that we all have to learn about that people don't necessarily enjoy hearing about and are scary and/or sad.  I think this movie did an excellent job capturing the horror and pure shock at understanding what had been going on.  I also do not feel that there were so many interesting characters as they seemed just to be real.  I could see everyone of these people in real life as they were depicted doing very human and very emotional things. 

United 93 does not fill me with despair.  Nor does it fill me with hope.  I feel that there is reason to mourn and to grieve but no reason to despair.  That being said there is no hope of reasoning with these people who would commit the terrorist attacks.  More than anything the movie fills me with a feeling of anger.  I do not remember where I heard it but somebody once defined a rebel as being a person who fought against the the military.  A perfect example of this was in a movie we saw earlier this year about the partisans.  While in order to survive they did steal from some civilians they targeted only military targets.  The terrorists behind 9-11 targeted civilians and even if they had only crashed into the pentagon they hijacked civilian aircraft which is something unforgivable.  The United States and other countries besides have hurt civilians but it was by accident and they were not the intended targets.

To me never forget means two different things.  The first is to honor the memory of those who lost their lives on 9-11 at the hands of truly evil people.  The second meaning, at least to me, is to not forget that there are groups or even countries out there that would love to see us destroyed and to keep our guard up.

The Hurt Locker

I really liked this movie.  I think that it was very good at trying to portray the sense of how intense it is to work under pressure in the way that these soldiers have to.  While all soldiers work under pressure the job that these specialists have to do is probably the least desirable one I can think off.  The one question I had however was that upon returning to the base it appears as though the kid who was killed was still alive.  Did the soldier mistake the kid who was killed for the one he had befriended?  That is what I concluded anyway.  I think the content applications to today are present and important as well.  The movie shows how civilians can be hurt or even killed even when soldiers are careful.  This applies especially to warfare today in the middle east.  It annoys me that newspapers seem all to eager to blurt out that "X number of civilians were killed in X country" and then blame it one the soldiers rather than on the terrorists.  While in some cases it is the fault of soldiers in many others it is the terrorists who kill their own people (The body bomb and the man with the bomb strapped to him).
I think this movie showed me the psychological effects of war (though All Quite and Yellow Birds were probably good at this as well) and also the level of tension and stress as well as uncertainty of who your enemy was.  To me there was no most memorable scene but rather several scenes that all went together.  The scene with the body bomb they found and the scene with the man who had the bomb strapped to him were both very memorable and actually made me angry more than anything else.  While the IEDs could have hurt innocents there were a number of attacks in the movie that deliberately hurt civilians and for those people I have no respect.  Rebels who fight against a military could be wrong, but honorable.  People who deliberately kill civilians are not respectable and must be stopped.
I'm going to be totally honest and just admit that I looked up what the title meant.  I obviously knew it wasn't good but I had absolutely no idea beyond that.  According to a BBC article the title is army slang for being injured in some way though it lacks a clear definition.  

Miracle

 As I have probably mentioned before I am really not much a sports fan.  I can only name a handful of teams and I only watch half a dozen games a year, although I do always watch the Steelers play the Browns every year as I was born in Pittsburgh.  That is why it is strange to me that I actually really did like this movie.  When I first heard that this was going to be the next movie we watched I was a little disappointed having already seen it twice.  When the movie ended however I found that I had actually enjoyed it and it seems to be the sort of movie that only gets better every time I see it.  There were parts that were hard to follow however as two players (O'Callahan and McClanahan I think were their names) had very similar names and two player (Possibly the same ones) looked very similar as well. 

The miracle was only partly that we beat the Russians.  What makes it so incredible was that it came at a time when American moral was at an all time low.  Due to the cold war we wanted to prove ourselves and the hostage crisis did nothing to raise our self esteem.  This however did give us something to be proud of,

I have seen this movie exactly once a year for three years in a row now.  It is not intentional but every year there is a teacher who wants to show us this movie.  That alone is proof that this event had a sort of significance that is unmatched by any other sporting event today.  I cannot think of another event that I have lived through that had the same positive aspect.  Though I was not old enough to remember it the 9-11 attacks had the exact opposite effects.  At the turn of the millenia we were #1 at almost everything world wide and the attacks shocked us and seemed impossible and hurt moral as much or more than the miracle on ice had raised it.

Apollo 13

I happened to like this movie a lot actually.  I was happy that the special effects while good, were not the focus of the movie.  I think that the movie really was able to capture how the astronauts felt when put in such a hopeless situation.  The characters were interesting enough but I found myself drawn more to the actual mission to space and the ideas of such a mission.  I'm not sure exactly if it has many content applications to today in terms of the whole rush as a result of the cold war.  I do however think it is interesting, if sad, that NASA has not received as much money as they used to.  Growing up obviously the space shuttles sounded cool but they had already been in use for a while so going to space while amazing, was something that had already been achieved a while ago.

The theme of the movie is a little harder to figure out.  One possible theme is the idea that there is always hope.  Had the astronauts given up hope they would surely have died but instead they chose to fight and therefor survived.  It was a good movie that showed how people can act when they believe that they are in a situation where they might very well die.

This along with The Godfather is another movie that I have heard so much about.  Unfortunately I was absent and therefor missed the entire second half of the movie meaning I will have to rent it and finish watching it some time in the near future.  I am honestly kind of sad because of how many good things I have heard about the movie.  When I left I was at the part where JFK had been assassinated meaning I had already witnessed the conflict between the butler and his son.  That was what was interesting to me in that while both wanted greater rights they sought to achieve this goal through very different means. 
The content can still apply today in two different ways.  The first and most obvious being that it reminds of the racism of the past so that we can see it more clearly in the present.  The other way that the content continues to apply is that it raises the question of how to protest injustice, should we take a direct stand as did the son or a more subtle approach as did the father?  Personally I agree at least for the most part, with the son.
As I said before I only was in class for the first half and therefor I may have made a mistake about the movie as a whole.

The Help

I think this is the only movie I have already seen before this class making it a somewhat strange experience.  What I find looking back is that I did not have any real strong opinion on this movie one way or another.  I did not think that it was bad or boring but at the same time I did not think it was all that great either.  The idea however, was very interesting and there were definitely funny moments.  More than anything that was interesting in terms of character or plot was the extent to which the movie seemed to capture the feel of the time period.  It seemed to accurately portray the lives of people which is a true rarity amongst modern films.
The Jim Crow laws were the written code of the era.  I believe what sticks out to me the most about them is just how much they portray African American people as being untrustworthy and dangerous.  The laws are almost as harsh as to treat people as if they were animals.  I believe that it would actually have been very easy to enforce these laws.  When the country was established it was by people from England and Africans were brought over as slaves.  This made it easy for governmental officials to subjugate people based on race or ethnicity.

The Pianist

There are many movies that are set in the second world war and the pianist has received better reviews than many other movies set in the same period.  Naturally this caused me to go in with relatively high expectations.  Unfortunately I felt rather let down by this particular movie as I found it to be just a little boring and it seemed more like a collection of random events instead of a steady flowing movie.  The movie also skipped over the rebellion (as I believe this was supposed to be the Warsaw ghetto) which was one of the most important parts of that ghetto's history.  I was also disappointed by the apparent absence of interesting characters which is one the best parts of a good movie.
The ending was somewhat confusing to me in that the Nazi officer takes pity on Szpilman.  Despite the fact that this was true it is also a very isolated case.  As a whole the Nazi party was brutal, merciless, and simply evil.  As can be seen there were members of the party who disobeyed orders and the morally correct thing but they were very rare.  This is why I am somewhat at a loss for what to make of this.  Hosenfeld seems to be a respectable person though it is not clear why he acted as he did.  Perhaps he was forced to join the army and did not believe in the Nazi ideas.  Maybe he knew that they would lose the war and did not care about Nazi policies anymore (troops often begin to simply cease performing when moral is low).  As for why Szpilman would trust Hosenfeld though, I believe that maybe he didn't.  Szpilman simply had no alternative other than to trust Hosenfeld.  Had he not he surely would have died.