The Light Between Oceans is a great novel written some years ago by M. L. Steadman. This story is brilliant and so is this movie which will probably receive the Oscar for best-adapted screenplay. I do not recommend this movie for any woman who has ever had a miscarriage or who has ever lost a baby because many scenes deal with this subject are as difficult to watch and heart wrenching, as any movie I have ever seen. This movie has a roller coaster of more human emotions than I have ever seen before in one film, including love, hate, betrayal, extreme sadness, depression, happiness and fear.

What makes this movie so great is that it points out the human motivations and decisions we make in life that we decide because of extreme emotions caused by temporary circumstances. To create a great story, emotional decisions like the ones in this film have to make sense and have some logic behind them and this movie delivers this perfectly throughout. Fundamentally, short-term relief of a decision may give you long-term grief for the rest of your life and cause you more agony than the original problem ever caused you in the first place. This movie also tries to answer a very fundamental question. Can two wrongs make a right? For the complex and well told story behind this great movie, the answer to that question is yes. The point is, after a certain period of time, it can just be too late to undo a huge mistake that you make due to extreme emotions because then it might hurt other people, in this case a 4 year old girl.

Everything about this movie, the story, the dialogue, the scenery, the twists and turns are all outstanding making this a must see flim. Alicia Vikander is the lead actress in this movie and Michael Fassbender plays her husband. Alicia has a career in movies right now that is exploding, especially after winning an Academy Award for best supporting actor for the Danish Girl and this movie could give her another Oscar nomination. Fassbender and Vikander are now in a relationship after working together in this movie, which is understandable because of the powerful love story in this film. Due to the highly emotional scenes in this film, some parts are very difficult to watch, but this potential downside comes with movies like this one that are this emotional and so well done. This movie along with Indignation, also reviewed in this blog are two of the best films of the year. The Light Between Oceans gets my highest recommendation.

The Light Between Oceans

The year 2000 was a bad year for most everybody. The stock market internet bubble burst in March, and then in November we all found out that because Flordia used 1950’s card reader technology in elections, the United States was incapable of electing a new President in November. We all remember the “hanging chads” stupidity and watching people, one in particular in Florida that looked cross-eyed holding up cards and trying to read the votes of people in Florida. It turned out that Al Gore really won the election, definitely the popular vote and in the end the supreme court assigned George W. Bush to be the new President in January 2001, a full two months after the election. During these two months as it had for the entire year of 2000, the stock market continued to go down just about every single day. For me, the year 2000 was one of the worst I have ever had, with financial loss and some very bad jobs, so going to a great movie like Remember the Titans, which is easily the greatest movie about Football ever made, gave me a lift, at least for a few days. For me, this is mostly what movies are all about, a temporary escape from reality and a chance to think about something else than your own problems.

The movie Remember the Titans is a true story of a High School Football team in Virginia that was extremely racially divided. This problem was made even worse when a black coach, played by Denzel Washington replaced the long-standing white coach, played by Will Patton and after that everything went from bad to worse. Now the new black coach; had a far more difficult task of not only having to mold a Football team but also deal with the racial problems that came up on a daily basis within the team and in the small Virginia town they played in. The two central Football players in this movie Gerry Bertier played by Ryan Hurst who is white and Julius Campbell, played by Wood Harris who is black are at the beginning of this movie bitter enemies, mostly because of race. At the end of this movie, they are as close as brothers and the transition from enemies to close friends is what makes this movie so great. The other thing that is great about this movie is Denzel​ Washington, in arguably his greatest role as the Football coach. His speeches about “perfection” and relating Football to the civil war and reminding all of his players just how hard it is to be the best Football team, with drill after drill getting his players in supreme​ shape so they are in better shape than all the other players they will face in the season was inspirational. Football is hard and there is only one way to be the best, hard work and this message comes through the many scenes of practice and training during this film. The actress who almost stole the movie was Hayden Panetteire, who at the time this movie was shot, was only 10 years old. She played a young girl who was obsessed and very knowledgeable​ about Football and her performance was very memorable in this film. One could argue that Hayden never got a movie role this good ever again in her career, which could also be said for most of the other actors who played Football players. Ryan Gossling and Kate Bosworth are also in this film which came out in 2000 in the early stages of their careers. Both of them went on to make many more quality movies.

I highly recommend this movie, which is in my opinion, one of the best sports movies ever produced.

This movie is highly unusual because it is entirely dialogue consisting of two people, Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson on their first date. I cannot remember any movie that was entirely about a long conversation between two people with the exception of Before Sunrise or Before Sunset that starred Ethan Hawk and Julie Delpy. The challenge with a movie like this is to make the dialogue compelling enough so that it is not so boring that you don’t care that the entire movie is about a conversation. For the most part, the screenwriter of this movie, Richard Tanne about the first date of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, did a good enough job with the writing to pull this movie off. For the most part, this film held my attention throughout the entire 90+ minutes.

The actors in this movie, Tika Sumpter and Parker Sawyers also did a very good job in their challenging roles of nothing but dialog and I appreciated the numerous moments of “show not tell” where just by her eyes, Michelle showed her enormous displeasure of Obama’s constant chain smoking and this also included the moment when she told Obama to “forgive his father” for abandoning his family so he can go on and achieve more than what is father could have. From Obama’s eyes, you could tell this was the moment where he fell in love with Michelle.

One issue that most amazing about this story is how Barack Obama is still alive at age 55 considering the extreme smoking he has done throughout his early years. How someone as intelligent and successful as Obama could have smoked this much is a mystery and also a miracle that he didn’t​ get any of the many diseases that smoking causes.

This is a solid movie and I do recommend it.