The Family : a movie review

Tags

France, Luc Besson, mobsters, movie, movie review, postaday2013

Today my hubby and I went to go see the movie “The Family” directed by Luc Besson. He is the director, writer and creator responsible for one of our favorite movies of all time “The Fifth Element”. We have easily seen it thirty times and it never gets old. This time Luc Besson took his creative genius to France and put a mobster family living under witness protection there to live amongst the locals. The story is based on a book named Malaviva but he wrote the screenplay and was the executive producer. I read in a magazine interview that after finding the cast; Robert DeNiro, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Tommy Lee Jones, Luc Besson was going through the rolodex of directors trying to come up with the perfect director and finally gave into his huge desire to work with these great actors who he had never had the opportunity to work with before and so he cast himself as the director.

I have read the “professional” reviews and they are pretty harsh. I, as well as my hubby, disagree with those reviews on all counts, we sincerely enjoyed it. We loved being in France with the cast, I loved how they shot Michelle Pfeiffer, she is still beautiful and they closed in on her beauty and how refreshing it is to see a beautiful face without cosmetic enhancement. We could see her life lines and they make her even more lovely because she has experience, hopes, sadness, adversity and character impressed on her face and as an actress we get more of her emotions written on her face and that made her silences richer. Perhaps being 46 makes me more sensitive to what it must be like to age on the screen and Michelle has aged beautifully and it gives me happiness to see it.

The other actors, all of them did a bang up job in their roles and France did was she does best for me, make me smile and watch the countryside, the buildings, the small towns, the small streets and the people.

We really enjoyed the movie, I know that it was panned by the critics, but who cares, it made me happy to watch it and that is all that counts.

No fair!

Tell us about something you think is terribly unfair — and explain how you would rectify it.

I think that the cost of higher education in the United States is completely out of control. Yearly college tuition has increased at a rate of several hundred percent over the past decade and a half and that is completely outrageous. The powers that be, seem to think that it is okay and logical to send our future workers out into this world in debt, or if they don't want debt, subject themselves to a life of minimum wage, since without a college education you can't get ahead.

In the state of Oregon, the state legislators have come up with a plan, actually lobbied to them by a political science class of college students known as Pay It Forward. This plan would be that a state university's education would be free and the graduates would allow 5% to 15% from their paychecks to put into the till for the following incoming classes. I think that is a grand idea, how can any young person get ahead in life if they are starting out in the red?

Moreover, these high costs of education seem to only make their way up to the salaries of the administration and the universities presidents, this is a gross misuse of tuition monies; most universities everywhere own all of their real estate, professors nowadays are merely adjunct, so they don't earn that much, neither do the teaching assistants, so all that money goes up top and we aren't in any position to change it because there is the sad fact that without a college degree you are stuck. So until other states follow Oregon's lead, there isn't much any of us can do except write our legislators to get them to pool more resources and re-invest in our students. I think that these ideas are the only way to go for the moment. I am disgusted by the sheer amount of greed that exists in the supposed academic world of this country.