Hannah Arendt

Movies to See Right Now

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FRUITVALE STATION

This week’s MUST SEES are The Hunt – the best movie of 2013 so far – and the emotionally powerful Fruitvale Station.  The Hunt is likely out for only one more week.

Woody Allen’s very funny Blue Jasmine centers on an Oscar-worthy performance by Cate Blanchett.

I haven’t yet seen Amanda Seyfried and Peter Sarsgaard in the porn star biopic Lovelace.  You can read descriptions and view trailers of it and other upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My other recommendations:

  • The rock documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, essential for music fans.
  • Another rock doc, A Band Called Death with the story of three African-American brothers in Detroit inventing punk rock before The Ramones and The Sex Pistols – and then dropping out of sight for decades.
  • the satisfying shocker The Conjuring.
  • The HBO documentary Casting By, which reveals an essential ingredient in filmmaking.
  • Another HBO documentary, The Cheshire Murders, which takes us beyond the familiar police procedural.

Also out right now:

This week, there’s no DVD/Stream of the Week – get out to see The Hunt and Fruitvale Station!

On August 11, Turner Classic Movies is featuring Henry Fonda movies, including his iconic performances in Mister Roberts and The Grapes of Wrath.  But I also like the oft overlooked comedy A Big Hand for a Little Lady, where Fonda plays a pioneer who has lost almost everything in a poker game and then becomes ill just when he is dealt a very promising hand; his wife (Joanne Woodward) must decide whether to hold ’em or fold ’em.

Movies to See Right Now

by
THE HUNT

This week’s MUST SEES are The Hunt – the best movie of 2013 so far – and the emotionally powerful Fruitvale Station.  The Hunt is likely out for only one more week.

I haven’t yet see Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, which opens today with very positive buzz.  You can read descriptions and view trailers of it and other upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My other recommendations:

Also out right now:

This week, there’s no DVD/Stream of the Week – get out to see The Hunt and Fruitvale Station!

On August 7, Turner Classic Movies is showing the under appreciated 1954 film noir Pushover, with Fred MacMurray as a rogue cop trying to steal a criminal’s girlfriend and loot – and then escape from his pals on the force.

Hannah Arendt: an intellectual argument now stale

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HANNAH ARENDT

Hannah Arendt is a movie about an intellectual argument that has since been resolved in favor of the title character.  Hannah Arendt was a noted political theorist and a leading thinker on totalitarianism.  In 1961, The New Yorker assigned Arendt (a German Jew who herself avoided the Holocaust by fleeing to the US)  to cover the trail of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.  Instead of finding Eichmann to be personally monstrous, she saw him as a bureaucratic functionary who failed to think through the monstrous consequences of ordinary tasks; he took pride in successfully loading people on to a train without taking responsibility for sending them to their extermination.  Arendt made Eichmann the poster boy for she coined as “the banality of evil”.

While the banality of evil is is a concept generally accepted today, it caused a furor at the time from those who could not accept that a human catastrophe of the magnitude of the Holocaust could have been enabled by ordinary humans.  Hannah Arendt is the story of that controversy.  Unfortunately, it’s difficult to make a compelling movie about a quibble between intellectuals – and even more challenging when the argument itself has been stale for 40 years.

Arendt had achieved academic status in the 1950s that was remarkable for a woman of the time.  She was also arrogant and tone deaf to political correctness, which helped her step into the controversy.

Arendt is ably played by Barbara Sokowa.  Janice McTeer (Tumbleweeds, Albert Nobbs) gets a much flashier role as Arendt’s loyal friend, the feisty writer Mary McCarthy, and McTeer’s performance is by far the most watchable piece of the movie.

For a much more visceral exploration of the banality of evil, I recommend Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, described in my 5 Essential Holocaust Films.