Film reviews

The Boys of Baraka
Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2005

The Boys of Baraka is, without a doubt, one of the best and most moving films I’ve ever seen. The directors follow four boys, ages 12 and 13, for three years as they go through the process of being chosen for, traveling to, and learning at an experimental school in Kenya for troubled Black male youths. Without hitting the audience over the head with wearying and ungraspable statistics, I got the message that not only does attention need to be paid to kids like the ones in the film, but that these kids can actually make something of their lives.

It was amazing to hear the boys speak of their lives in Baltimore, M.D. They seemed to have an understanding of the odds that were stacked against them, and even though they didn’t completely give up on dreaming of something better for themselves, they realized that there was a real possibility that they’d get stuck in the same rut in which they found the men in the neighborhoods. The fact that Baraka is told primarily from the boys’ points of view is what makes it so powerful. ~J.B.

Millions
Directed by Danny Boyle, 2004

Danny Boyle’s Millions is ostensibly a plot-driven tale about what happens to Damian and his family when a sack full of cash falls on top of the cardboard hide-out Damian has built by the railroad tracks near his new home in Liverpool, England. Should they use the cash to do good, as Damian wants? Or, should they spend it on themselves and their family as his practical 9-year-old brother, Anthony (Lewis McGibbon) argues? For Damian, doing good is his mission from God and could be the path that leads to seeing his mother again. For Anthony, it’s payback time for all that’s been taken from him.

But Millions is much more than a cash caper about what to do about the money (and what happens when a bad guy comes looking for it). The choices the boys make put a light on the hidden pain of a grieving family and the difficulties it faces in moving on, especially when the steps are so different for each member. The film has the look of a book you read to a child on the verge of sleeping and dreaming. It’s vibrant and verdant and heartbreakingly inviting, begging you to escape into a lovely tale in which children, through a simple act of faith, find their own heaven on earth. ~J.R.

Blackout
Directed by Jerry LaMothe, 2007

On August 14, 2003, one of the hottest days of the summer, there was a citywide power outage in New York. Jerry LaMothe’s Blackout allows the audience to relive this event from the perspectives of several characters, each experiencing a different level of discomfort as a result of not having any electricity for 24 hours.

Unfortunately, the film falls short of its intention, which is presumably to shed light (no pun intended) on an inexcusably and potentially conspiratorial event that left a large population of inner-city minorities without electricity for an entire day. The point (as constructed from watching the behind-the-scenes specials on the DVD) that the filmmaker is trying to make is that the city simply didn’t care enough about these people to get their electricity back on in a timely manner, so that: a) looting and rioting wouldn’t occur, and b) no one would have died. A couple of conversations to this effect somewhat flippantly occur throughout the film, but no one screams about it convincingly enough to really make the audience feel that a major injustice had been done and that a movie needed to be made. For me, the events that were portrayed in Blackout could’ve happened any day of the year, in any “rough neighborhood.” ~J.B.