Movie Review: 'Rita Working Title' looks at the relationship between a writer and her words

Creative writers are devoted first to their words. It is a relationship that, like others, must be watered in order to grow and then nurtured in order to develop into its own. Michal Bat-Adam’s Rita Working Title is about this relationship and how, if a writer does not know herself well enough, the relationship can circle around going only where it’s already been. Or it can just stop. Words can divorce a writer.

Rita Working Title is not a cop-out by Bat-Adam to avoid the lame and unforgiving “untitled” for the film. Although it could benefit from a colon after Rita, the intrigue of not having one is kind of nice; it adds to the exploration of the film. Rita, the woman, the screenwriter, is the working title. The movie she cannot seem to write, or complete, is also the working title, for how easy is it to name what has yet to be born? Since a writer often becomes what is being written, since a writer writes best when she writes what she knows, Rita and her work are working titles.

The whole thing really is quite nice, charming even. In the course of this 100-minute production, Rita manages to write, for the audience to watch come to life, four different screenplays, none complete because she says she’s tired of writing the same old story of desire unfulfilled. Though for the viewer, the lack of fulfillment comes when the story is abandoned just when it starts to get good.

In each script, Rita plays the main character, yet another indication that she truly is this working title, lost if you will. It’s not until her best friend, a terribly attractive professional actor named Gadi discovers that he has no idea who or where he is, for, as the co-star in her script attempts, he plays a taxi driver, a mechanic, an accordion player and a bachelor with a broken heart. Gadi decides he cannot go on like this.

Of course, it is up to Rita to write them both out of the mess she created. And no, the film is not a let down. Rita does in fact clean up her mess, and she does it in the way that most creative writers do. She divorced the words.

Movie Review: 'The Path of the Skeptics': an art gallery on film

The Path of the Skeptics was like viewing an exhibition in a museum more so than watching the film it actually was in the Landmark Theatre Thursday night. Perhaps it was that, having been my first experience with a short film (it ran exactly 30 minutes), I obsessed over every frame. I was taken by the extreme amount of grace given to each shot and the amount of care given to those things in the shots.

By Italian filmmaker Filippo Feel Cavalca, The Path of the Skeptics (La passeggiata dello scettico) displays just how significant some meetings are. The story is Danilo’s, an agnostic philosophy student, on the anniversary of his mother’s death. His mother, Celeste, was an artist, which explains why the film could be made into a series of stills and sold as framed art. As Danilo remembers it, she was “enraptured in blue.” Throughout the short, blue flower pedals, very much alive and very much a symbol of her, rain down turning the screen into a spring dance.

When the priest, Don Luciano, comes to bless Danilo’s house, the two find that they share not just a common love for philosophy but a need for God as well. And so their paths cross, putting both men’s existence into context: “Freedom can frighten a man,” says Don Luciano. With that, they are both left with a choice.

Cavalca didn’t let one minute go unused in The Path of the Skeptics. A film done so well is like stepping into the rooms of an art gallery, for if the gallery also uses the entire potential of its space, the visitor is left open-eyed and full.

Movie Review: Newton I. Aduaka's 'Ezra' is a film about Love as much as War

There is much to be taken away from a film in which, in the first 15 minutes, a child, no more than nine years of age, is shot and killed as an example for the other children to do as they are told.

Ezra is a Nigerian film about the 11-year civil war in Sierra Leone; it is about the real and the abstract: child soldiers, blood diamonds and AK-47’s, fire, and community—its ancestors, elders and the village—love, war, remembrance, forgiveness. It is especially about forgiveness, about love and war, about the three as experienced by the children, the child. Ezra.

He is the 16-year-old soldier who cannot remember killing his parents or others’ during the attack of his village. His story is fragmented, a collage of stolen lives told in flashbacks. His sister, Onitcha is witness to parts of his truth. Through the siblings’ accounts, Ezra is both boy and man.

His walk is so tall and hard, for everything and for nothing; the fire in his eyes is more a ravaging blaze than a rising sun; the gun he carries is an extension of his arm, less a symbol of manhood than a telling of childhood. But despite what he has seen and done, despite the war around and in him, he is found. Her name is Mariam, or Black Diamond. A soldier herself, though for a different camp, she chose this life. She also chose Ezra.

It is easy in the 110-minute production to forget that the story unfolding is the story of so many. The film points out that just eight years ago, nearly 120,000 children were serving as soldiers in Africa. Director and script writer, Newton I. Aduaka based the film in fact, and he did well to script and show not just the face of a child ripped from childhood and recast as a soldier but the spirit of this child as well.

A film so full of what war does can leave a viewer with many how’s and why’s, but this may not be Aduake’s sole purpose. Ezra is also about love. Represented unconditionally in Ezra’s sister Onitcha who receives a beating when she attempts to follow her brother instead of go home, love is reason enough to fight, to dance, to live.

In one scene, he sits with a sketch pad in hand drawing Mariam, now his wife. She leans into him, smiles, and whispers what his next action shows: On his pad, he makes round what was initially her flat belly. The scene reality-checks the viewer, reminds him or her again that this is a story of the boy who is also the man named Ezra. A smile floats past his lips as he looks down, too humbled to look into her, an act that suggests that love can be ageless and care not for lives taken, that it’s only to be received.

And, yes, with much to be taken away from a factual film as this, the softer side should not be discounted though the questions should come. Love that reaches beyond what was stolen or forgotten is reason enough.

Movie Review: The Great Debaters

In Character, Washington Displays What Words Can Do

The Great Debaters is a movie for a reason: It reminds us now what had to be endured and overcome then, and it does so with a black man just as fearful of being lynched as the next. Written by Robert Eisele, The Great Debaters is called Oprah’s movie because she produced it, and it’s tagged as yet another for Denzel Washington to star in, never mind that he also directed it. And although he does shine, as does Forest Whitaker, they do so softly. The movie is not concerned with famed faces. It’s concerned with the actual man that brought about a need for these faces to tell a story in the first place.

Set in 1935 in the Jim Crow South, The Great Debaters is about a black college debate team, Wiley College, in Marshall, Texas. The team is pitted as the underdogs, but the coach, Professor Melvin B. Tolson (Washington), didn’t believe in being under anything or anyone. At most times radical and at all times passionate, he wanted more for his team, more for his people, and more for his community than the South wanted to give, and as a result, it is Tolson that projects this story, this movie forward.

An inspiring teacher, activist, and man, he separates the Wiley College debate team’s story from the others involving the struggles and uplifting of the black community. The team wasn’t led by an outsider, an educated and soon-to-be humbled white coach, teacher, or leader. The Great Debaters isn’t another Glory Road, Freedom Writers, or even Glory. It’s more like a Lean on Me with the megaphone-carrying, door-chaining principal, Mr. Joe Clark.

And it’s like cool water on a July day. Tolson believed in the power of words. He believed that knowledge, once gained, could never be taken away and once spoken, could never be silenced. “I am here to help you find and keep your righteous mind,” he says to his team. And thanks to Oprah and Washington, Tolson, some 70 years later, has said the same to us, for we are representative of the change he spoke, wrote, and fought for.