monabassil

"I am Sam" is about a mentally disabled father, Sam (Sean Penn) who fights for the custody of his 7-year-old daughter Lucy (Dakota Fanning), with the help of lawyer Rita (Michelle Pfeiffer) and neighbour Annie (Diane Wiest).

It has a good humanitarian side to it; it is a reminder that mentally challenged people deserve to be treated kindly, and that sometimes they are more capable of giving love than people with better I.Q.s.

Sam adores his daughter, who loves him just as much but she is smart enough to notice that her mental capacities are superior to his. They share such a wonderful complicity that I find it hard to believe that a father-daughter relationship can be that solid. The premise is incredible. No one ever raises any questions about Sam's ability to raise his daughter until she is seven! Sam is the father every child wishes to have: he is caring, patient, loving, giving and selfless. He cares too much for her and not enough for himself; I'm no psychiatrist but it is commonly believed that autistic people are much more self-centered than that!

Another unrealistic part: with all due respect to mentally challenged persons, I doubt that a restaurant as popular as Pizza Hutt and a coffee shop as famous as Starbucks would actually hire someone like Sam, regardless of his position.

Moreover, everyone in this movie seems to be afflicted with some sort of a mental or emotional problem. Lucy suffers from anxiety, Sam and his close friends are all mentally handicapped, Rita has problem communicating with her son and her marriage is falling apart, Annie has not left her room in years, and even one particular doctor who testifies against Sam in court has developed a guilt pattern because her son died of an overdose.

All of these elements combined make the viewers feel they are being manipulated in a somewhat obvious manner.

Finally, let's be objective here: the whole movie focuses on reuniting Sam and Lucy, regardless of Sam's handicap and how the latter would lessen the girl's mental and educational growth. Undoubtedly, Lucy would never find a more loving father, but she also needs 'regular' people's guidance and besides, he needs assistance himself!

The filmmakers were obviously not sure how to end the movie in a believable manner, therefore the ending was ambiguous. Lucy most probably ends up being "shared" by Sam and her foster family, Rita seems to have regained her son's trust, and Sam's mentally challenged friends will have the same habits for the rest of their lives, like video night every Friday.

So I guess that is a (sappy) happy ending. Again, not very believable and too many questions are left unanswered.

Overall, the movie is good; it is very moving and at times, it does put a smile on your cynical face. :) Everyone gives an excellent performance, even Fanning, though I find her character a bit too smart and perceptive for her age.

The soudtrack rules! But then again, I'm a Beatles addict, so it's hard for me to be objective. I enjoyed the scenes of Sam and Lucy together and how certain Beatles cover songs fitted the mood and situation. Sam is a Beatles freak himself; he named his daughter Lucy Diamond after "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and throughout the movie, he uses analogies related to the band's life and songs to express his feelings and point of view; those portions of the script are clever and make his character interesting and rather 'creative' compared to, say, Rainman.

Fortunately, the movie did not stay in the courtroom and ended on a football playground.

"I am Sam" has garnered Sean Penn a Best Actor Oscar nomination, and he truly deserves to win that award.

I came out of the theater with a nauseous stomach. Being Lebanese, I had experienced war, and this movie just managed to bring back that sick feeling of fear mixed with morbid fascination.

And yet another "based on real facts" movie to honor American heroes. In 1993, 19 American soldiers perished in a raid that was ordered to bring about the defeat of the Somali militia and, consequently, the end of the hunger crisis in Somalia. Even though it was a civil war, the U.S. thought of it as "a genocide" and dispatched 123 elite soldiers there for a simple mission that turned out to be totally nightmarish for Americans AND SOMALIS ALIKE, mind you (1000 Somalis died that day). But, since Pentagon had to approve and stamp the script prior to production, I'm not surprised the movie turned to be such a (visually stunning!) propaganda. The American elite soldiers are courageous, attractive, humanitarian, compassionate, and so on. The Somalis on the other hand are portrayed as a mindless, ruthless, bloodthirsty, chaotic mob.

The movie was realistic, sometimes too realistic, i.e. too gory. In my opinion, Scott crossed the line between movie and documentary, and because of that the movie fails as a movie and the documentary fails as a documentary. This is as far as the overuse of gunpowder and bloodshed is concerned. And when I say bloodshed, I don't mean close-ups of severe wounds, but insert shots of decapitated soldiers, and of 'idle' fingers, hands, legs, and intestines all over the place.

Some of the characters were recognizable and easy to follow in the heat of the action (duh, as if Hartnett and McGregor were going to go unnoticed!). But to be honest, sometimes you just lose count of who got killed and in what circumstances and who managed to survive. And because of that, you just don't sympathize with them when they express pain and anger due to the loss of their comrades.

The clichés were inevitable: "tell my parents that I fought well", "kiss my little girls", Rangers and Deltas leaving posthumous goodbye letters with the soldiers left at the base, a soldier calling his sweetheart home and leaving her a love message on her answering machine (yep, she missed him by one second cause she was, of course, shopping). One element of surprise: usually, in movies, when a soldier is seen gazing at the photo of his sweetheart and/or children, it's a sign that he will die very tragically very soon. Well, not this time: the only soldier who is shown doing the above is incredibly lucky; he survives a plane crash, the angry armed mob, and he is the only American soldier of the Raid who to be held captive by the Somalis; yet he is eventually released. I couldn't help notice that.

I'm done with the cons of the movie, now I'll move on to the pros.

Needless to say, the action was dazzling, sensational, suspenseful, etc, etc. There was never a dull moment, but it was a tad confusing at times.

The strongest point of the movie was the superb editing. The insert shots of the Somali victims were poignant: heartfelt music, grainy photography, lonely "skinnies" (and how dare they call them that in the movie, by the way?) wandering in the ruins of their city, with their moving expressions of grief and confusion. I particularly liked the opening scene of the film, it managed to pull out the desolation, misery, and suffering of the Somalis.



The moral of this movie? It doesn't matter if the U.S. have every right to butt in other countries' civil wars, what matters is that every American soldier on foreign soil must be brought back home, dead or alive. Mostly dead, in this case.

First of all, I've never read the novel by Maeve Binchy, so I'm not going to make a comparison between the book and the movie.

The plot:

Set in the 50s. Three young Irish girls with distinguish personalities get their share of lessons about friendship, love, family, betrayal and college life.

The characters:

Minnie Driver is very convincing as Benny, the straightforward, sensitive, caring, and humorous virgin with plum curves, a radiant smile, and expressive eyes. She is an only child and lives with her modest family, taking the bus on a daily basis to go to college in Dublin.

Chris O'Donnell is Jack Foley, a wealthy medical student and rugby star. He is attractive and a tad naive. He and Benny fall in love, their attempts to get close to each other, both in the physical and the emotional sense, are clumsy (because they lack experience), but sincere and touching.

Geraldine O'Rawe is Eve, Benny's lifetime friend, an orphan who was raised by the nuns but who has enough guts to ask for and obtain a scholarship, and stand up for Benny against Nan when need be.

The pretty Saffron Burrows plays Nan, Benny and Eve's childhood friend, who left the village early to live with her family in Dublin. She is very aware of her attractive looks, and attempts to use her wannabe sophistication to trap a wealthy man into marriage when she becomes pregnant with his baby (predictable). But the man rejects her (again, predictable), and so she betrays Benny by seducing Jack and claiming afterwards that she is carrying his child.

Alan Cumming is excellent as Sean Walsh, Benny's father's employee who constantly attempts to seduce the young girl, to no avail. You will probably hate him in this role, he truly is despicable, manipulative, sexually obsessed, voyeur, irritating, etc. His hairstyle (a fringe on the right please) and suspenders make him look ridiculous. In one word, Walsh is a real pain, but Cumming gives an excellent performance here. His sleezy mimics cannot go unnoticed.

The Irish landscape, with its hilltops, pittorresque rivers, woods, small roads, and adorable cottages is one of the fine aspects of the movie.

There isn't much to analyse here, the story line is simple and the dialog pretty straightforward. The overall atmosphere of the film is friendly, warm and 'cozy'.

There is definitely an emotional bond between Benny and the viewers, unless you're too much of a cynic to sympathize with a sensitive, self-conscious, modest girl set on a (realistic) journey of womanhood.