Movies to look out for in December

Movie Title: Unbroken

Not many people have the time to watch movies, some steal the time to do while many others can go a distance to get the latest.

If you are one of those few who would go the extra mile to get the latest, Unbroken is definitely going to thrill you.

This movie, a World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, is Angelina Jolie’s second film as director, which is scheduled to be released this month (December).

Painfully, Jolie has announced her intention to retire from acting just as Unbroken is about to hit the market.

The movie is the true story of Louis Zamperini, a promising young Olympic runner from Torrance, California, who was called into service on a bomber crew in the Pacific in World War II.

Zamperini’s plane went down in the Pacific Ocean forcing him and two other survivors to drift for over 40 days living on rainwater and the occasional fish or bird they could catch.

One of the crash survivors died on the raft. Zamperini, who met Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics, and the other survivor (the plane’s pilot), were finally approaching land when they were captured by the Japanese navy.

Meanwhile, their captors did not inform America of the capture of Zamperini and colleague but kept them as prisoners for more than two years and thereafter declared both men officially dead.

With a screenplay co-written by the Coen brothers and adapted from a bestselling book by Laura Hillenbrand (Seabiscuit), the epic drama features Jack O’Connell (’71) as Zamperini, who died in July aged 97. You cannot afford to miss this heroic movie when released on 25 December.

Movie Title: Wild

Another movie to watch out for in this festive month is ‘Wild’. In one of this Oscar season’s many road movies, Reese Witherspoon plays a former heroin addict who hikes the 1,100 m (1,770 km) of the Pacific Crest Trail.

Adapted from Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling 2012 memoir, Wild is directed by Jean-Marc Vallée with a script by Nick Hornby.

Still, Wild is never less than involving as it follows Witherspoon’s Cheryl from the Mojave Desert, in the summer of 1995, to the Oregon-Washington border more than three months later, deftly maneuvering between her past and present sufferings along the way.

 The film gets some wry comic mileage out of her misguided early decision to strap on an enormous, unwieldy backpack, which is so heavy that a fellow hiker christens it “the Monster”. That may just be one of the many examples of how ill prepared Cheryl was for this particular trip, despite her tough, resilient attitude and cross-country training.

 Slowly she plods her way northward, dropping expletives with every step, subsisting on oatmeal that she heats on a small gas-powered stove, fending off the occasional rattlesnake, and trying to stifle the inner voice that keeps telling her, “You can quit anytime.”

In Wild, her performance has been tipped for a best actress nomination at the Academy Awards.

The movie “Wild” would definitely be praised when released on December 5 for having a strong, well-written, flesh-and-blood female at its center, it is to the film’s credit that it wears this badge of honor with a lightness that in no way undermines its sincerity.

Source: Thenationonlineng