Pass the Popcorn: Movies from where I Sit

My three favorite Oscar contenders for this year are "Gravity", "Twelve Years a Slave" and "Captain Phillips".  And they all are being given a lot of recognition.  "Gravity" has a perfection about it because it works as a metaphor for our time here on earth.  We are busy suffering, ungrateful for life, misunderstanding it's promises, which really are, as Buddhists say, birth, old age, sickness and death.  When we look at the earth clearly (same message as in this summer's "Elysium") we begin to treasure our brief life, and understand that we are not alone, as all sentient beings share this fact.  Everything is always changing, you can't control your life, even if you are a science engineer, as Sandra Bullock's character is, and once you let go of the illusion that you are separate (as she does when she imagines George Clooney's character talking to her in the cockpit) everything is possible.  When Bullock struggles out of the capsule, the confinement of her concepts and beliefs before going into deep space, she is reborn with sturdy, firm feet planted upon the warm sand of the beach.  She is now ready to live while she is alive.  She will, this time, be present.

"Twelve Years a Slave" rests on a metaphor as well.  It's the camera position in this film:  looking from foot level upward to let us know we are experiencing what slaves experienced - being below notice, not being fully in the frame, having to look upward to our supposed "betters", who are hellish indeed.  And yet again, despite the horrific treatment of Solomon, he also notices the beautiful sunsets, the little earthly treasures in his confined world, until his soul opens wide and he sings the spiritual at the gravesite, and becomes, even welcomes his slavehood.  He doesn't wait to become human again, he insists on it when everyone around him says he is not.  He will not kill Patsy either, because he will not renounce life, no matter what.  He chooses life, as does Bullock.

"Captain Phillips" is a metaphor of fear, and each character connects to the others by powerlessness and fear.  Greenglass has shown a world where life is arbitrary and valueless.  The Somalis are slaves of the tribal warlords.  Phillips is a slave of the Somalis, but also the American military, because they don't share his understanding of the position of the pirates.  He tries to save them, but his warlords choose otherwise.  His fear at the end of the movie, when the nurse is attending to him, is a testament to his humanity, his compassion and his grief over the fate of a people with no way out.  Thus the film embraces our commonality, our lack of control over what fate brings to us.  We can only choose not to lose our humanity, and Phillips, like Bullock and Northrup, stand for that choice.