Dear White People (2014)

“Dear White People” is the political college racial satire that was supposed to send the university where I work into gasps of “Oh, no, they didn’t!” hysterics. But most of the audience, every race and age you can dream of, chuckled nicely, sort of, while others dozed off or texted. If the best satires stay with you forever, think “Strangelove,” this is “PCU” on an Internet-sourced budget. Anyone recall “PCU”? Flick is set at some sunny liberal arts school that once served rich white kids, but still wobbles at that whole desegregation thing. Tyler James Williams -– he’s on “Walking Dead”!! -– is the closeted gay nerd trying to fit in amongst Black Power radio DJ Tessa Thompson and spoiled racist GOPer Kyle Gallner. One example why this is such a yawn: The climax has a party where white kids dress in black face to booze and laugh off slavery. The whole scene fizzles. The end credits show real images of college kids –- good Southern GOP children all, Hello, MSU -– doing the same, and I got out of my seat in rage. See? B-

The Purge (2013)

“The Purge” is horror with a nasty serving of satire that slashes at the Tea Party elites who think wealth makes them holier than anyone below them, and yet angry at anyone who dares have a bigger house or a nicer car. I dug it. Ethan Hawke plays a self-satisfied hawker of home security devices in year 2022 of a post right-wing-revolution “New” America. Money is God. Guns are the Holy Son. The NRA might be running the show. One day each year, true “patriots” –- the haves -– are allowed (encouraged) to rape and murder at will, with the bottom of the economic chain the true target. But, Hawke’s quirky liberal teen son (Max Burkholder) opens the family fortress to a hunted veteran and soon preppy masked hunters come house crashing. (The sociopathic leader is unfailingly polite and dressed in a blazer with a haircut that screams edgy Young Republican. I knew assholes like him in college.) Writer/director James DeMonaco might not have a great film, but it’s daring, even if the end has too many pointers and Lena Headey’s wife remains flat. (I had hopes the “good” son might turn a shocking path, but did not happen.) B

Seconds (1966)

John Frankenheimer serves another perfect thriller with “Seconds” after “Manchurian Candidate” and “Train.” This is a “Twilight Zone”-like sci-fi-horror about that foolish notion we all wonder: What if I zagged left not right? Moved there not here? You get it. What if’s never end. This is the hell-pit answer. John Randolph is banker Arthur -– bored empty nester pissed at the capitalist lie he swallowed from birth –- who finds himself with a crazy proposition: He can fake his death and get a new identity in the form of Rock Hudson. Newly renamed, Antiochus joins a hippie commune. Sex. Freedom. Is liberalism as much a mirage as white-shirt conservatism? Beautifully played with a barrage of warped lenses – the cinematography is by James Wong Howe of “Sweet Smell of Success” fame -- this movie is a true deep shocker that left me breathless long after the credits. As a man with a new body and voice who cannot shake old gestures and hesitations, Randolph and Hudson pop brilliant, actors who could have shared a Best Actor Oscar. Frankenheimer is my favorite director and this is another hit in a series of paranoid-heavy movies that crack men’s psyches open, baring dark truths. A+

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

It amazes me “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was ever needed. But so goes American history. It opens with a 1960s pop song playing as a giddy couple make its way from an airport to the girl’s childhood home, where she will introduce him to Mom and Dad. The couple is mixed race, her white (Katharine Houghton) and him black (Sidney Poitier). The taxi driver smirks. The parents (Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey) are open liberals, but just how so? We find out in one long evening. Yes, it’s coy now, post-Loving vs. Virginia, but not too easy. Poitier’s fiancé puts a burden to the parents: Accept me and our whirlwind romance now or I call it off. Can anyone demand that? His doctor character is such a saint, it near smothers debate. The screenwriters intently did this to fully play the race card, but does it serve character? What if he were a reporter at Tracey’s old man’s paper? The dialogue is still sharp and Tracey –- then dying of cancer -- is powerful. Hepburn, too. Her crying is contagious. A-

The Croods (2013)

In “The Croods,” Dreamworks’ sticks a Griswald-like family in the Stone Age, cave people still moping around with no fire and staring helpless as the land mass known as Pangaea breaks apart to form what we now recognize as Earth. (Try explaining this to your 4-year-old.) Plot: Ignorant dad (Nicolas Cage) is scared of all things new, while teen daughter Eep (Emma Stone) is ready to explore and push pop’s rules off a cliff. So, yes, it’s “Brave” B.C., with the inevitable scene where grumpy dad admits he’s wrong, and spunky kid is right. A genre staple as old as cave drawings, for sure. We’ll see it again. But even “Croods” cannot carry its story to the finish, switching midway from Eep’s perspective to the father’s. (It’s all so beware-climate-change liberal heavy-handed, even I blanched.) Much of the animation surprises, though: Prehistoric pets are imagined outside the box and will delight children and adults, and a gag involving early photography got this shutterbug laughing. The rest: Forgettable. C+

Silkwood (1983)

True story “Silkwood,” directed by Mike Nichols and co-written by Nora Ephron, effortlessly plays like a captured documentary of Karen Silkwood, a lowly 28-year-old worker at a plutonium plant who died in an unexplained car crash after she started investigating safety violations at her thankless job. During her ordeal, Silkwood (Meryl Streep) found herself on the end of repeated, unlikely exposures that even reached her own home, shared with a boyfriend (Kurt Russell) and best friend (Cher), the latter a lonely gay woman. Nichols makes no saints, our three protagonists are all coworkers and flawed people. Karen strays. Russell’s boozer alpha male is loyal to the company, and so on. Money and family struggles, and the damning judgment of the unrealized American Dream are harsh. I first saw “Silkwood” at age 12 and was blown away by Nichols’ unforgiving realism of humiliating decom showers, and Streep’s stunning near naked performance. Political punches? Big money corporate corruption is bare knuckle, but so is the depiction of a union that seems far too hungry for media attention. Streep’s singing of “Amazing Grace” is the most pained and therefore perfect version I have ever heard. A

Paths of Glory (1957)

“Paths of Glory” is Stanley Kubrick’s dramatization of a doomed French army attack on a German-held hill during World War I, and the immoral trial that follows where three soldiers are accused of cowardice. Or, rather, not sacrificing themselves for country, God, and their general’s careers. Kirk Douglas plays the defense attorney turned Army colonel who survives the ill-planned attack and will damn himself rather than see one of his soldiers die for false pride. This is pitch-black, dead serious satire, a liberal’s film from the go as it eviscerates the essence of war and the military brass that strategize in palaces while their men die in muddy trenches. Kubrick’s direction is tight and powerful, there’s not a wasted scene in this razor-sharp film. His long tracking shots along endless trenches are breath-killing claustrophobic, nailing what must be the true fear of battle, where doomed men debate how they will go out: bomb, bullet, or knife. A scene where a sociopathic general berates to a soldier, “there’s no such thing as shell shock,” slices hard. American hero Patton did that. This film is no fantasy, but depicts a true, terrible story. A+

Lincoln (2012)

“I could write shorter sermons, but when I get started I’m too lazy to stop,” said Abraham Lincoln, 150 years ago and quoting a rhetorical preacher.  

What better motive to be brief: Working from a screenplay by Tony Kushner (“Angles in America”), Steven Spielberg’s near-miraculous masterpiece “Lincoln” isn’t a full-life bio-pic of the 16^th president, but a careful, smart study of the man’s final months in office as he tried to end the Civil War and pass the 13^th amendment fully abolishing slavery, fearful his Emancipation Proclamation will fall useless once the nation re-unites. 

“Lincoln” –- at its most basic -- may be about legislation, yet it plays out as the most nail-biting, and, yes, funny thriller of our time, for no reason more so than this is about the true, ugly birth of America, where all men are created equal. (Women waited longer for equality; the gay population still waits its turn, Kushner makes apparent.) 

Leaving behind old tricks and sentimental streaks found even in “Schindler’s List,” Spielberg has made a time-capsule story where the fights inside smoky rooms seem like found-footage from 1865. With our nation again deeply divided over everything from budgets to gun control, “Lincoln” almost seems a warped, darkly ironic mirror and wake-up call for today.  

His own miracle maker, Daniel Day-Lewis brings Lincoln to life in astonishing detail –- high voice, striking bouts of anger and compassion, an endless tenacity for jokes and asides that charm some men and drive others mad. Day-Lewis again has topped himself, even with his volcanic performance in “There Will Be Blood.” 

This is no liberal party, though: There’s a scene where Day-Lweis as Lincoln is placed across from famed abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), and the latter barks, “It’s called leadership, you should try it for a change.” That is a blistering order to Obama. (And, yes, the movie nails that it was Democrats in the oh-so-wrong here, reluctant to see slavery fall, whilst Republicans -- liberal ones -- fought to end it. Dems were conservatives back then. Irony.)

The acting all around is the best of the year, the cast inspired by the script, the ideals on screen by Kushner? Who knows. Enjoy it. This good a cast is rare. Jones and Sally Field (as Mary Todd) are equal to Day-Lewis at every turn to the point when husband and wife rip each other over son Willie’s death, the audience -– I –- felt as if I were a eavesdropper. 

Even 10 minutes too long past a poignant stopping point, this is -- for now -- the Best Film of 2012, worthy of a long sermon and national viewing and consideration. And here I stop, not too lazy. A

Hysteria (2012)

“Hysteria” is a mostly daring, often hilarious satire, more commentary on history, than actual deed-for-deed, word-for-word history. In 1880s London, the city’s poor are loathed and considered trash by the rich. To help or mingle with them is status quo cultural sin. Women, damn. Women are thought to suffer from hysterical delusions, and if they speak out too loudly, demand change, and a right to their own (gasp!) body, then they face institutionalization. 

More than a handful of good ol’ U.S. Republicans will recognize these traits as the glory days of all humanity. The Romney-Ryan ticket approves, certainly. (Add in blatant hatred of homosexuals.) Indeed, “Hysteria” shows a time best forgotten. Or satirized. Not re-lived.

The big tongue-in-cheek focus lays on the invention of the portable electric massager that gave any woman a right to her own pleasure. We follow a young doctor (Hugh Dancy) who is vile enough to not only wish to help the poor, but recognize the science of germs, who is tossed from job after job for his beliefs. 

So, he bounces into the employ of a physician (Jonathan Pryce) who treats hysteria, the catch-all phrase for the female symptoms I described above, you know, dissatisfaction. Here the film turns riotously funny because the “treatment” at this time means literally having a doctor manually massage a female client to climax, for her to be relived of “unwanted” thought. Hilariously, the endless workload distresses Dancy’s Mortimer Granville to near disability, or what we call carpal tunnel syndrome. More hilariously: Watch how the older female clients of the physician practically rip apart Granville with their eyes. Enter the vibrator, which our hero doctor sees in another device worked on by a rich (and very liberal) friend. 

The old physician, by the way, has two daughters: One demure and colorless, by force, the other, headstrong, willful, and ready for a fight. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the latter. Yes, trouble brews. When Mortimer foolishly calls her a “socialist” for wanting to help the poor, leaving her own privilege behind, the audience nodded knowingly.

The brew goes flat -- dare I say limp? -- at the end, though. The climax of courtroom speeches and declarations of love is old, and far too Hollywood, umm, rigid for an English film made about breaking boundaries. That grinds loud and old. But I could not help but dig watching the way “Hysteria” parallels our own time, and how far some of us want to go back. We need another shakeup, STAT. B+