Summer Learning - Films

Erin Brockovich
MPAA Rating: R - USCCB (A-III) -- adults
Biography | Drama

Julia Roberts won a Best Actress Oscar for her role in this legal drama based on the true story of a woman who helped win the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit. Erin Brockovich (Roberts) is a single mother of three who, after losing a personal injury lawsuit, asks her lawyer, Ed Masry (Albert Finney), if he can help her find a job. Masry gives her work as a file clerk in his office, and she runs across some information on a little-known case filed against Pacific Gas and Electric. Brokovich begins digging into the particulars of the case, convinced that the facts simply don't add up, and persuades Masry to allow her to do further research; in time, she discovers a systematic cover-up of the industrial poisoning of a city's water supply, which threatens the health of the entire community. Erin Brockovich was directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Freedom Writers
MPAA Rating: PG13 – USCCB (A-II) -- adults and adolescents
Crime | Drama

Assigned the thankless task of teaching freshman English at a gang-infested Long Beach, CA high school, a 23-year-old teacher resorts to unconventional means of breaking through to her hardened students in director Richard LaGravenese's adaptation of Erin Gruwell's best-selling memoir The Freedom Writer's Diaries: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them. Her students had been written off, but Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank) wasn't about to go down without a fight. Despite the initially hostile reaction she receives in the classroom, Gruwell uses the writings of children in war-torn settings to teach her students not only the basis of the English language, but also compassion and tolerance as well. Later, when the time comes to tell their own tales in a project specially designed to explore the daily violence to which the majority of students have grown numb, the barriers that had once stood so strong gradually begin to crumble. When the only chance for survival is to befriend the person who was once your mortal enemy, the world is opened to a whole new realm of possibilities.

Lawrence of Arabia     

MPAA Rating: PG - USCCB (A-II) adults and adolescents

Adventure | Biography | Drama | War

Winner of 7 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, this is the story of an inordinately complex man who has been labeled everything from hero to charlatan: Thomas Edward Lawrence. The story opens with the death of Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) at the age of 47, then flashbacks to recount his adventures.  As a young intelligence officer in Cairo in 1916, he is given leave to investigate the progress of the Arab revolt against the Turks in World War I. In the desert, he organizes a guerrilla army and, for two years, leads the Arabs in harassing the Turks with desert raids, train-wreckings, and camel attacks. Eventually, he leads the unified Arabs in the fight for independence from the Ottoman Turks in the 1920s. This sweeping epic about the real life adventures of T.E. Lawrence also stars Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif, Jose Ferrer, Claude Rains, and Anthony Quayle.

Pay it Forward

MPAA Rating: PG13 - USCCB (A-III) -- adults
Drama | Romance

A young boy stumbles upon a simple way to change the world in this drama. Trevor (Haley Joel Osment) is a bright 11-year-old boy who comes from a troubled home; his mother Arlene (Helen Hunt) is an alcoholic trying to hold down two jobs to support her son, while Trevor's father (Jon Bon Jovi) left his family behind some time ago. At school, Trevor's class is introduced to their new social studies teacher, Mr. Simonet (Kevin Spacey), a guarded man with severe facial scars. Simonet gives his class an unusual assignment -- think up a practical way to make the world a better place, and put it into action. Trevor comes up with the notion of “Pay It Forward" -- do a needed favor for three different people without being asked, and then ask them to do the same for three others. His solution bears unexpected results that ripple out to the entire city. Based on the novel of the same name by Catherine Ryan Hide.

Schindler's List
MPAA Rating: R - USCCB (A-III) -- adults
Biography | Drama | History | War

Based on a true story, Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List stars Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, a German businessman in Poland who sees an opportunity to make money from the Nazis' rise to power. He starts a company, using flattery and bribes to win military contracts, and brings in accountant and financier Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) to help run the factory. By staffing his plant with Jews who've been herded into Krakow's ghetto by Nazi troops, Schindler has a dependable unpaid labor force. In 1942, all of Krakow's Jews are assigned to the Plaszow Forced Labor Camp, overseen by Commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), an embittered alcoholic who occasionally shoots prisoners from his balcony. Schindler arranges to continue using Polish Jews in his plant, but, as he sees what is happening to his employees, he begins to develop a conscience. Realizing his factory (now refitted to manufacture ammunition) is the only thing preventing his staff from being shipped to the death camps, Schindler demands more workers and starts bribing Nazi leaders to keep Jews on his employee lists and out of the camps. By the time Germany falls to the allies, Schindler has lost his entire fortune -- and saved 1,100 people from likely death. Schindler's List was won 7 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and it quickly gained praise as one of the finest American movies about the Holocaust.

Superman: The Movie
MPAA Rating: PG – USCCB (A-II) -- adults and adolescents
Action | Adventure | Fantasy | Sci-Fi

Richard Donner's big-budget blockbuster, Superman: The Movie is an immensely entertaining recounting of the origin of the famous comic book character. Opening on Krypton (where Marlon Brando plays Superman's father), the film follows the Man of Steel (Christopher Reeve) as he's sent to Earth where he develops his alter-ego, Clark Kent, and is raised by a Midwestern family. In no time, the movie has run through his teenage years, and Clark gets a job at the Daily Planet, where he is a news reporter. It's there that he falls in love with Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), who is already in love with Superman. But the love story is quickly sidetracked once the villainous Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) launches a diabolical plan to conquer the world and kill Superman. Nominated for three Academy Awards, it received a Special Achievement Award for Visual Effects.