Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what I’ve seen over the past week either in film or television. On the film side, if I have written a full length review already, I will post a link to that review. Otherwise, I’ll give a brief snippet of my thoughts on the film with a full review to follow at some point later. For television shows, seasons and what not, I’ll post individual comments here about each of them as I see fit.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

12 Years a Slave

Steve McQueen is one of our finest filmmakers. 12 Years a Slave tackles a challenging part of United States history, giving the audience an opportunity to experience the disgusting, pervasive attitude towards people of other races that existed 150 years ago and persists in small pockets to this day.

Chiwetel Ejiofor commands the screen as a free black man from New York tricked into becoming a slave in the south for twelve years before ultimately becoming free again. Ejiofor creates a sympathetic character whose strength of mind and soul carry him through some of the most torturous and harrowing experiences anyone could be subjected to. That he had the ability to taste both freedom and captivity enables him to view his situation with skepticism, fear and hatred.

The cast McQueen has assembled is tremendous. Standouts include Michael Fassbender as Ejiofor’s vicious master for much of the film, Sarah Paulson as his hateful wife, and Lupita Nyong’o as his hard-working slave and catalyst for strife between him and his wife. While films set during the Civil War have attempted to convey the beauty of the area while highlighting the villainy at work, McQueen captures the South before the Civil War in its grandeur and its depravity with equal clarity. That realism adds weight to the story. Hans Zimmer’s quiet, foreboding score is among his career best and is a striking departure for the frequently bombastic composer.

The Wind Rises

Hayao Miyazaki is indisputably one of the greatest filmmakers in animation history. His films have captured the raw beauty of nature, the simple joys of childhood and the complexities of growing up in dark times. The Wind Rises marks his final feature film and what a gorgeous way to go out.

Like his previous films, Miyazaki juxtaposes the elegance of nature with the pitfalls of technology and advancement. Set during the years after World War I and leading through World War II, The Wind Rises is based on a real life aviation engineer who designed the prototype for a plane that would become one of Japan’s defining innovations. The film follows the engineer from his youth, inspired by the work of famed Italian engineer Gianni Caproni.

Miyazaki’s films have always blended a touch of the fantastical with early and late-childhood development, but this time out he goes for a historical examination of the advancement of technology and its ultimate use by cruel and wicked men for death and destruction. He finds the elegance of nature a central building block for technological development, adhering to his past expositions. To go out on a film like this is any filmmaker’s dream.

That he does so by telling his first truly adult adventure, he speaks about his own maturity as a filmmaker and revels in the fact that it’s finally time for him to “grow up” and move past the medium he once found so much joy and excitement in before he can no longer enjoy it. The entire film is a metaphor for his own life of ingenuity and advancement of the artform.

Strangers on a Train

Years ago, as an impressionable young lad, I recall watching Strangers on a Train on cable. I remember the phrase “criss-cross” and a loose understanding of the plot. Until now, I did not recall 95% of the film and that’s a bit of a shame. This is undeniably one of Hitchcock’s most fascinating pictures, a portrait of a miserable tennis pro and the murder of his wife at the hands of a man who simply wants to have the favor returned.

Farley Granger plays the tennis pro and Robert Walker plays the rich man’s kid who hates his father and wants Granger to kill him in exchange for ridding him of his troublesome wife. Having met on the train, Granger humors Walker until he has to depart, never realizing that the man is serious and carries out the “plan” against his wishes. What follows is a twisting, carefully constructed thriller that asks the audience to worry over Granger’s fate and hope that he can somehow escape unscathed even when turn after turn, his fate becomes more precarious.

The closing merry-go-round scene has to be one of the most fantastic set pieces ever constructed on film. The visual effects employed to show the audience a high speed destruction of the amusement park ride is almost seamless. With this and the riveting tennis match along with the terrific performances of Walker and Granger, Hitch serves up a masterful bit of excitement that plays out like the back-and-forth of his tennis player’s matches.

Saving Mr. Banks

A near-perfect confection of history and fantasy, Saving Mr. Banks explores the conflicted relationship between author P.L. Travers and Walt Disney over his desire to turn her stories about Mary Poppins into a major motion picture. The film would not only mark a turning point for Disney and his live-action studio, it would also provide a sense of closure for the entirely proper British novelist after the difficult childhood that led her to her creation.

The film plays fairly loose with historical elements, excising Roy Disney from all but a brief mention and ultimately redeeming Travers who never fully approved of the film and forbade further adaptations of her work. Knowing this going in may rob the film of some of its magical wonder, but the result is still a meaningful and significant achievement for a filmmaker whose prior work was as director of pedantic The Blind Side and as screenwriter for the same and other films of questionable quality.

John Lee Hancock is blessed with a terrific screenplay by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith that parallels the development of Mary Poppins with Travers’ life in Australia under an alcoholic father and a weak-willed mother. Emma Thompson gives the resentful, protective Travers a boisterous explosion of life, making her frequently demeaning and hateful, but also fractured and frustrated. Thompson’s ability to define a humiliated and distrustful woman clinging to the past, is the key reason the film works as well as it does. Tom Hanks as Walt Disney does a fine job conveying the paternal and almost childlike qualities of the legendary animator and showman, but doesn’t dig deep enough into the icon’s troubled and demanding personality. The film being produced by Disney helps keep those warts-and-all elements out of the production.

The real surprise here, but only to those who have only seen his populist side, is Colin Farrell who tackles the elder Travers who has a great love for his children, but hides his demons at the bottom of a bottle threatening to dislodge his family’s safety and security. It’s one of those rare performances that highlight an under-appreciated actor with a role worthy of his talent.

Frozen

For a company that spent so many years creating princess characters that adhered to societal expectations of women’s behavior, Walt Disney Co. has made great strides in changing course over the last two decades. With Beauty and the Beast, Disney has attempted to redefine the princess character as a woman who doesn’t need a man to be successful and can accomplish great things alone or in pair.

Unlike Beast and subsequent films, Disney’s strong-willed heroines have finally found success and happiness without having to have a man in the picture. Pixar’s Brave was ostensibly the studio’s first truly independent princess character. That tradition continues with two such characters in Frozen, a film about the eldest daughter of the king who develops magical powers she is unable to control. When she inadvertently injures her younger sister, they are cautioned by the trolls in the wilderness to erase the child’s memory and keep the two apart.

After their parents are killed at sea and they are left to roam the castle alone, the eldest princess reaches her coronation day and reveals to the kingdom her dangerous talent before running off into the woods to live freely alone and not bring further harm to her kingdom, even if she unintentionally turns their summer into a permanent winter. Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell give commanding vocal performances as the sisters, neither relinquishing their fierce independence even if it means angering the men around them. Although Bell’s younger sister follows the more traditional princess route, she remains a fiery strong figure. Menzel’s older sister on the other hand celebrates her own freedom from the yoke of convention.

As in Brave, the initial rejection of tradition initially leads to turmoil in the kingdom, it’s learning to control one’s impulses, but retaining your independence that ultimately results from both films. These are princesses for a new generation of young women and will hopefully continue to influence new attitudes towards gender topics as a result.