Dear Frankie - 2004

I saw this film at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City in May 2004 (where it had its PREMIERE) and I met Gerard Butler after the film. I knew then that he was a great actor. This is a very heartwarming, dramatic film.

Dear Frankie is a 2004 British drama film directed by Shona Auerbach. The screenplay by Andrea Gibb focuses on a young single mother whose love for her son prompts her to perpetuate a deception designed to protect him from the truth about his father.

Lizzie Morrison, her opinionated, chain-smoking mother Nell, and nine-year-old deaf son Frankie frequently move to keep one step ahead of her abusive ex-husband and his family. Newly relocated in the Scottish town of Greenock, she accepts a job at the local fish and chips shop owned by a friendly woman named Marie, and enrolls Frankie in school.

Through a Glasgow post office box, Frankie maintains a regular correspondence with someone he believes to be his father Davey, who allegedly is a merchant seaman working on the MS Accra. In reality, the letters he receives are written by his mother, who prefers maintaining this charade to telling her son the reason she fled her marriage.

In the UK, Radio Times awarded the film four out of a possible five stars and commented, "This simple story is rich with precise observation and it tugs at the heartstrings without being maudlin or manipulative . . . With its sincere and perceptive script, the beautifully shot film vividly captures the raw emotions of its complex characters . . . Despite occasional flickers of a fairy-tale ending, Auerbach ultimately resists the temptation, maintaining the realism and integrity that give this thoughtful feature its bittersweet charm."

Character - 1997

Netflix recommended this film to me based on my love of another and I was pleasantly surprised. Winner of the 1998 Best Foreign Language Film and filmed beautifully this Dutch-Belgian film definitely is one I would watch again.

Dreverhaven (Jan Decleir), the city's most feared bailiff, is discovered with a knife through his heart, and a young, self-taught lawyer (Fedja van Huet) who just passed his exams was the last person to see the man alive. But what was his connection to the dead man? The police are mighty interested to know, and the young barrister is ready to tell the story of a lifetime.

J.W. Katadreuffe is the son of Joba Katadreuffe and A.B. Drevenhaven. Though fully neglected by Joba, Dreverhaven ensures the succesfull career of his son. Mostly unseen, though he sues his son a few times. The son Katadreuffe succeeds, but at great costs.

Joba: Why don't you leave our boy in peace?
Dreverhaven: I'll strangle him for nine-tenths, and the last tenth will make him strong.

The Bicycle Thief - 1948

In the aftermath of World War II, Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani), an unemployed man, finds a coveted job that requires a bicycle. When it is stolen on his first day of work, Antonio and his young son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) begin a frantic search, learning valuable lessons along the way. The movie focuses on both the relationship between the father and the son and the larger framework of poverty and unemployment in postwar Italy

The film is frequently on critics' and directors' lists of the best films ever made. It was given an Academy Honorary Award in 1950, and, just four years after its release, was deemed the greatest film of all time by the magazine Sight & Sound's poll of filmmakers and critics in 1952. The film placed sixth as the greatest ever made in the latest directors poll, conducted in 2002.

Prospective producer David O. Selznick originally proposed casting Cary Grant as the lead. Vittorio De Sica countered with a request for Henry Fonda before deciding to cast all amateur actors.

C.R.A.Z.Y. - 2005

This movie was crazy good. Both a coming of age and a coming out movie that fed me the full range of human emotion. The father/son relationship in this film is dealt with in a very honest and heartfelt way.

There are five boys in the Beaulieu family -- Christian, Raymond, Antoine, Zachary and Yvan. But Zac (played by Emile Vallee and Marc-Andre Grondin) is the only one who's gay. That's why growing up in Montreal alongside his heterosexual brothers and his strict, emotionally distant father (Michel Cote) proves especially challenging for the blossoming outsider, who finds solace in the music of Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones and David Bowie.