#OnTheBigScreen: Green Book, Liewe Lisa, Alita: Battle Angel

Green Book

Set against the backdrop of a country grappling with the valour and volatility of the Civil Rights Movement, two men will be confronted with racism and danger, and be comforted by generosity, kindness and humour.  Together, they will challenge long-held assumptions, push past their seemingly insurmountable differences, and embrace their shared humanity. What begins as a two-month journey of necessity will establish a friendship that will endure for the rest of their lives.

When Frank Anthony Vallelonga aka Tony Lip (Mortensen), a New York City bouncer from an Italian-American neighbourhood in The Bronx, is hired to drive and protect Dr Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a world-class Black pianist, on a concert tour from Manhattan to the Deep South, they must rely on the Green Book – a travel guide to safe lodging, dining and business options for Black Americans during the era of segregation and Jim Crow laws – to steer them to places where Shirley will not be refused service, humiliated or threatened with violence.

The real-life Vallelonga crafted the screenplay with Brian Currie and director Peter Farrelly, and the characters that have been living in his mind for 50 years are brought to life through powerhouse performances from Academy Award-nominee Viggo Mortensen and Academy Award-winner Mahershala Ali.

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Liewe Lisa

If you are looking for a heartfelt local film about love, loving and finding one’s way through the things that prevent us from finding out true selves and happiness, Liewe Lisa marks the remarkable feature debut of writer-director Hendrik Cronje.

7de Laan's Hendrik Cronje on making the transition from acting to directing

Daniel Dercksen  13 Feb 2019

Daniel (Cronje) secretly dreams of becoming a writer. In the pursuit of excitement, he finds himself trapped in an illicit affair with the wife (Barbara-Marie Immelman) of a powerful businessman (Albert Maritz).  Things take another dramatic turn when he falls in love with the same businessman’s daughter (Elani Dekker). After his mistakes are revealed, he abandons the life set out for him and meets Tom (Zane Meas); a simple fisherman who helps Daniel to achieve his true potential in life. 

Alita: Battle Angel

Two of today’s leading creators of game-changing movie realms, James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez, have combined their mutual zeal for world-building and empowered female heroines to push the possibilities of visual story-craft into a new zone with Alita: Battle Angel, an epic adventure of hope and empowerment.

They now invite audiences to enter directly into an intricately alive metropolis of the future – and into the high-octane yet heartfelt mission of Alita to fulfil her human potential – forged through an alchemical mix of evocative performances, creative design, state-of-the-art performance-capture technology, CG imagery, VFX and native 3D filmmaking.

Based on the graphic novel series by Yukito Kishiro, Alita: Battle Angel re-imagines a mythical post-apocalyptical world as a photo-real city full not only of behemoth cyborgs, furiously fast sports spectacles and dark justice but also of compelling human stories.

In the 23rd century, Earth underwent “the fall” – a shattering war that halted all technological progress and left in its wake a society where every last shred of tech is repurposed and the strong prey on the weak.  Three-hundred years later, the heart of life on Earth beats in Iron City, a rich melting pot of survivors – a city full of ordinary people and cybernetically-enhanced humans living side-by-side in the shadow of Zalem, the last of the great Sky cities.

Iron City may be an oppressed factory town, cranking out goods for the invisible elites who live in the sky, but it has its own colour and energy, its thrills and its aspirants. And now, it is about to get an unlikely hero, a teenage cyborg who emerges from a junkyard to discover her identity and become a source of buoyant hope.

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Read more about the latest and upcoming films: writingstudio.co.za/lets-go-to-the-movies