Waterland (1992)

"Listen and I'll tell you a story of long kept secrets, sexual scandal, and murder... It's the story of my life." Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons (Reversal of Fortune, The Lion King) delivers a brilliant performance in this powerful and provocative story as history teacher Tom Crick, who inspires his students to embrace the past and discover the marvels and mysteries of life. Through a series of extraordinary stories, he takes them on an unforgettable journey into the past that changes their lives forever. However, one student (Ethan Hawke, Training Day, Dead Poets Society) proves to be more of a challenge, leading to revelations in which the past's haunting grip on the teacher's life threatens to consume all around him.

Featuring an incredible supporting cast including Sinead Cusack (V for Vendetta), Lena Headey (Possession), David Morrissey (Girl with a Pearl Earring), John Heard (Cutter's Way), Pete Postlethwaite (The Usual Suspects), Cara Buono (Gladiator), Ross McCall (Band of Brothers), and Maggie Gyllenhaal (Secretary).

SPECIAL FEATURES:New Digital Widescreen Transfer, New Audio Commentary with Director Stephen Gyllenhaal, New Interview with Composer Carter Burwell and Theatrical Trailer.

Often the most worthwhile histories are the histories not discussed

This is an incredible movie from director Stephen Gyllenhaal, father of Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal. The movie is viewable and enjoyble on multiple layers and from multiple contexts. Some of us don't understand language, and some of us are not drawn to learn to understand language, until we are attracted to someone who is on the other side of a river's shore, someone beckoning us to speak. And when we can't find the words, or when we don't know the words, we instinctively fall underwater toward the object of our attraction - sometimes not able to consider much of anything else besides them.

The movie touches on these themes: Without education, our misunderstandings can drive us to harm ourselves and others. Most monsters don't know they are monsters. Most evil is done under flawed justifications of good. Our definitions of self, religion, justice, ideals, and morality can warp or refine our actions.

The movie addresses these univeral and important questions: How do you forgive yourself after you may have contributed to the death of someone you loved? How do you forgive your past selves? How can you stop the cycle of abandonment after you've been abandoned? How do you not abandon yourself?

I was never very interested in history as it was taught to me in school, because the histories I was taught avoided controversies. They proclaimed the "one true interpretation of the past." They were watered down stories that didn't tell us many of the key things that really happened.

Histories that are worth learning, remembering & discussing are often the histories polite society doesn't discuss.

The lead character, a teacher, frustratingly asks his student, "Bloody Hell Price! Why do you make all that extra effort for mathematics and nothing for history?"
His student replies, "'Cuz math makes sense."

I personally lost a muse once. "And that day I discovered there are many ways the world can end. As many ways as there are people."

As a muse, she started ideas in motion in me, reasoning frameworks that began to make sense of so many of our worlds' crazy histories. "In one life, there can be more than one ending. It's been like that in mine."

The movie suggests: We may benefit by not believing in any stories that are dependent on falsehoods or omissions. To start on a path to recovery: First, find ways to forgive yourself. Never abandon yourself. And even if you don't think you deserve forgiveness, move on because if you can't move on, you may do more harm to yourself and others. And move on because that may be the only way to continue to benefit yourself and others. August 12, 2007

An underrated action gem

Al Gore may have warned us about global warming in "An Inconvenient Truth," but Kevin Costner and co. actually showed us our disturbing future ten years ago. The polar ice caps have melted, flooding the entire earth. Costner plays The Mariner, one of the surviving humans who has adapted by growing gills and learning to drink his own body fluids.

At the start of the film, The Mariner stops at an island made from junk to try and sell a tomato plant. The inhabitants of the island notice The Mariner's gills and throw him in jail -- they don't like mutants. While in jail he meets Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn from "Basic Instinct" and "The Firm") and her daughter Enola (Tina Majorino from "Andre" and "Napoleon Dynamite") He talks to Helen about his entrepreneurial ideas involving tomato growing and body fluid filters, and Helen thinks he is flirting. The Mariner is about to correct her when the island is attacked by the Smokers, a group of pirates on Jet Skis led by Deacon (Dennis Hopper "The American Friend" from "Speed").

The Smokers kidnap Enola, who has a map tattooed on her back, which shows the location of Dryland. Deacon needs to get to Dryland to get oil for his army of planes, boats and jetskis, but he can't decipher Enola's map. The Mariner eventually rescues Enola and defeats Deacon. When they get to Dryland The Mariner offers to pay for Enola to go to private school. This upsets Helen -- she says she doesn't want another man giving her daughter false hopes. The Mariner closes the film saying he just wanted her to learn how to subtract.

The film isn't nearly as awful as critics made it out to be in 1995. The story is somewhat generic, like Mad Max on water, and sometimes it's hard to see where the 235 million dollars went, but for the most part "Waterworld" makes for solid action adventure. November 25, 2006

Quiet Perfection From Jeremy Irons

I found this movie on IFC late last night and remembered the lasting effects it had on me when it first came out. Irons plays a Pittsburgh history teacher who escapes his crumbling marriage by weaving tales of his family history into his school lessons, he and the students literally walking into WWI veteran hospitals and his childhood home of the English Fens. Irons brings a fragile power to the professor knowing his day his done, his final speech to the school, accompanied by the somber score, incredibly moving. His real life wife Sinead Cusack plays his spouse, ravaged by some dark secret. Though she overdoes the wailing a bit, only Dick Cheney could be unmoved by the closing scenes. See it if only for Irons' gulping smoke rings scene in the bar with Ethan Hawke - the great tortured actor of our era, in one of his best. December 5, 2005

AMAZING

dude, this movie is off da hook. absolutely wikid. i would recommened it to any1, even jah himself! November 5, 2004

A story well told, a novel well adapted...

It is one of those rare moments in life, when you go to a movie theatre, and just purchase a ticket for the next-best movie, not knowing (or caring) what it is about. In one particular case, this was "Waterland", and the money felt well-spent. The original novel the film is based on is set in England. Incomprehensible as it may seem to some to change the setting to a place in the USA for those parts that describe the adult life of that frustrated and unhappy history teacher, it gives the story added depth. The angle from which the movie develops the plot (a teacher, exiled in the US if you will, is challenged from all sides to defend the value of history) is compelling since it unravels most beautifully and emotionally the teacher's own involvement with it. I do not want to give away what the story twists are, go into the film as I did. But the way the movie uses two different time lines to tell the whole story, and interweaves them artfully, is brillant. Jeremy Irons (I actually did not know him at the time, believe it or not) is most fitting as the main character. Ethan Hawke, well I guess they had to pick somebode to play a rebellious pupil, is not bad, but his performance does not contol the movie. Sinead Cusack, on the other hand, plays so convincingly the part of the teacher's wife, still hunted by the common past, that this role is sort of stuck to her in my view. February 23, 2001

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