Movies I recommend

Over the past few months, there are a number of movies that I have seen that I recommend to others for viewing:

• The King’s Speech

  This movie won the Oscar for Best Picture, and for once I actually agree with the selection.  I saw this in either late December or early January and it is now one of my favorite movies.  The movie is centered around King George V of England, the father of current reigning monarch Queen Elizabeth II.  King George had a very bad stammer and worked with speech pathologist Lionel Locque to make it better.  In the age of radio, as opposed to newspaper, a monarch could no longer look good – they now had to sound good.

  The film goes through the struggles that George V had and how he progressed from having a bad stammer to giving an inspirational speech at the beginning of World War II.

  I absolutely recommend this one.

• The Social Network
  
  This is a movie adaptation of the book “The Accidental Billionaires”.  It is the story of the founding of Facebook, the most popular web site in the world.

  The story traces through Mark Zuckerberg’s stormy relationship with the co-founder of Facebook, and how he “stole” the idea from a couple of other guys for the web site HarvardConnection.  In the end, Facebook and Zuckerberg lost both lawsuits not necessarily because he was liable but because Zuckerberg was not at all likeable towards a jury and settled out of court.

  Zuckerberg has come out and stated that the movie got a lot of stuff wrong.  To me, that rings true – Hollywood glamourizes everything or exaggerates everything for creative license.  Yet there are some things that no doubt are reasonably accurate – Zuckerberg’s dismissive attitude towards lawsuits, “stealing” the idea for Facebook, and being an inspiration genius and super-coder (programmer).

  I enjoyed this one and also recommend it.

• Howl’s Moving Castle

  I have watched a number of Japanese anime film maker Hayao Miyazaki’s films and if you haven’t seen any, this is as good a place as any to start.  This isn’t on my list because it’s my favorite Miyazaki film but because it’s the one I have seen recently and thereby fits into the theme of this post.

  Miyazaki’s films have common themes running throughout them – young girl and/or young boy (always less than 17) as the two main protagonists, bizarre technology such as airships (not like a blimp) or castles with oddities, elderly “witch” characters that are dual realities wherein they are cantankerous and crabby on the outside but actually good natured on the inside, and some element of the supernatural.

  After watching a lot of these films I started to get a better sense of the cultural values of the Japanese that is reflected in their video games like Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger.

• 9

  This was an interesting movie because before I picked it up I had never heard of it.  It’s produced by Tim Burton but not directed by him.  Still, you can see his influences in it.

  The story is another stop-motion animation movie similar to The Corpse Bride and The Nightmare Before Christmas.  If you’ve seen the latter, it’s definitely easy to tell where Burton’s thought comes through because some of the characters look the same.

  The story takes place in a world where machines and humans have fought a war and nearly all life has been wiped out.  9 dolls have survived and come to life and are trying to survive in this new world.  Suffice to say, the movie is a good one and once again, if you haven’t seen this then you should.

That’s all of my recommendations for now.