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Entertaining viewing on three DVDs
As always, each is available locally or through Netflix.
•Fly Away Home.1997. 97 minutes. English. Directed by Carroll Ballard. Featuring Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin. Columbia Pictures.
Great films never grow old. Ballard's story centers on 13-year-old Amy, who loses her mother in an auto accident in New Zealand and goes to live with her father, Thomas, in Ontario. She forgets her sorrows while "mothering" a flock of goslings in one of the most heart-rending movies I've had the pleasure of seeing half a dozen times.
When grown, the geese must "fly away home" to their winter home in the southern hemisphere before returning to their summer home in Canada.
However, nature can't take its course because Amy didn't know that goslings bond with the first creature they see at birth. Amy had found the goose eggs on the ground after their nest had been bulldozed. She took the eggs and put them in an old drawer in a shed, along with a strong light to keep them warm.
The next morning, Amy opened the drawer as the goslings emerged from the eggs and saw their "mother." Within a few days, the swiftly growing birds began following Amy down paths and across fields. Amy ran in front of them and they followed, jumping up and down because in a few weeks, they would try to fly.
Her father had experimented with an ultra-light aircraft, crashing all over their property without being seriously hurt. He quickly realized the geese would only fly south following Amy, so she would have to learn to fly.
The adventures of Amy, her dad and the birds from Ontario to the gathering place for migrating geese is amazing and amusing and sometimes quite dangerous.
This DVD is difficult to find, but it's out there if you look hard enough.
•Frost Nixon. 2009. 123 minutes. English. Directed by Ron Howard. Featuring Michael Sheen and Frank Langella. Universal Studios.
In addition to being the only U.S. president to resign his office in disgrace, Richard Nixon infamously insisted that the president was above the law. As he phrased it to English interviewer David Frost, "when the president does it, it's not illegal."
Director Ron Howard's award-winning movie is the story of those interviews filmed in the 1970s for the BBC. More than the customary question-and-answer interviews we often enjoy on interesting subjects, the six interviews of Nixon by Frost were a match of wills and personalities. They were pretty much life-or-death encounters. Frost was determined to compel the former president to admit he'd lied when he asserted he was in no way involved in the Watergate break-in, while Nixon was equally determined to conceal the truth and save his reputation.
There was a good deal of money involved. Neither opponent was working for nothing.
The whole match was like a six-round fight for the title, except that viewers had to wait a week between rounds. Every week more viewers tuned in for the action.
As we know, there was a knockout just before the final bell.
Taken. 2009. 91 minutes. English. Directed by Pierre Morel. Featuring Liam Neeson. 20th Century Fox.
One of the wonderful things about action thrillers is they don't have to be plausible. You're along for the ride, so you can just sit back and enjoy the show. And with Liam Neeson heading the cast, you're in the presence of an accomplished actor.
Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a retired CIA operative with some special skills. He was a "preventer" - that is, someone who prevents terrible things from happening by disposing of them before anyone knows they existed.
The work is dangerous and demands the operative is quick with his hands and his head. He often works alone. His self-confidence must be limitless.
The plot of "Taken" is simple enough. Someone has kidnapped his 17-year-old daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace), while she is on a summer vacation in Paris.
Just before her kidnapping, she calls her father, who tells her to hide under the bed and, if she's discovered, she must shout into the phone any description of the kidnapper she can. For example, hair color, height and so on. She's discovered, shouts as instructed. Listening, her father gets the information, but can't understand the language of the kidnapper. Checking with his former colleagues, he's told it's Albanian.
Bryan is on the next flight to Europe. He knows he's in for a rough time, but as the phrase on the front of the DVD says, "They took his daughter, he'll take their lives."
One viewer I know complains that many of the killings and the bloodletting are unnecessary and amount to poor storytelling. That's fair enough. I'm sure others will agree.
Charlie Langdon is the Herald's senior critic. He can be reached at langdons@gobrainstorm.net.
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