25 Years Ago This Month: September 1988

Of course you can see in the September releases that the big summer blockbusters have finished and the studios are trotting out the stuff they think will contend for awards (at least the first of them anyway). So that's how you end up with...

Michael Apted's adaptation of Dian Fossey's story, Gorillas in the Mist, starring Sigourney Weaver as the doomed zoologist murdered in her cabin in the mountains of Rwanda.

Richard Dreyfuss starred alongside Raul Julia and Sonia Braga in Moon Over Parador, a comedy about an actor hired to play the part of a dictator of fictional Latin American country Parador after the death of the actual dictator. Obviously made to resemble Augusto Pinochet, he ended up looking like a cross between the Chilean dictator and Gaddafi.

Margin Call Movie Review

The financial crisis that started in 2008 is far too complicated to explain in one 2 hour dramatic film. The experts on the subject can hardly understand exactly what led to such a tremendous financial crash. Some films have tried to get into it, including documentaries, all of which are too all-encompassing to make much sense or to coalesce the details into something understandable to a layperson.

J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call, however, is a smart little financial drama that takes place basically in the 24 hours before the big crash really started. Chandor, the son of a Wall Street investment banker, and a man who clearly understands a lot more about financial institutions and brokerage deals than I ever will, has crafted a screenplay and a film unlike anything I’ve ever seen on similar topics. Your typical Wall Street drama is so often fast-paced high tension designed to make what is otherwise cinematically uninteresting material more visually arresting. Chandor eschews the bells and whistles for a story that is character based.

Classic Film Review: Roland Joffe's The Mission

As a staunch non-believer I’ve only ever encountered two films that gave me a sense of what religious fulfillment is. Not that I was spiritually awakened or felt a desire to convert – nothing of the kind – but that the film was so skilled at conveying the significance of faith in God’s love without being preachy, that I understood through character development and acting what it is to find redemption and peace. And isn’t that what the vast majority of narrative cinema is about? It’s meant to provide you a glimpse into other people’s lives for a couple of hours and make you believe in their beliefs.

The first of these was The Mission, directed by Roland Joffe, and winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. I first watched it many years ago while I was in high school or college and I wasn’t sure if a second viewing so many years later would still produce the same effect in me. The difference this time was that I had greater appreciation for the craft of the film, which most likely subconsciously influenced my original belief that it was a great film.