I saw the documentary He Named Me Malala at the Grand Cinema with my wife and a couple of members of the Banned Book Club on Sunday, October 18, 2015. The month before we had discussed the book I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenage activist for girls' education who was shot by the Taliban in 2012. The movie is about Malala. It covers different aspects of her life, the similar figure in Pakistani history after whom she is named, her life and activism in Pakistan from before she was shot, the events surrounding that horrific incident, her present day worldwide activism, and her new life with her family in Birmingham, UK. The movie uses animation for events for which they do not have live footage. I liked how they did that. It was fairly simple animation but the characters very closely resembled the real people. Rather than being presented in a linear fashion, the different events are mixed up, jumping from scenes such as light moments with the family to a violent scene in Pakistan. I didn't have any trouble following the movie, though.
I heard about the movie from imdb.com and Malala's second appearance on The Daily Show with John Stewart. The movie is about 90 minutes long and directed by Davis Guggenheim who directed the documentary Waiting for Superman a few years ago and Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. I had originally heard that He Named Me Malala opened October 9 or possible earlier. Then I heard it was opening on October 16 at the Grand Cinema and planned an outing for the club for the 18th. After later hearing that it would start at the Grand on October 9, I kept the outing on the 18th because that Tacoma Film Festival was going on during the weekend of October 9-11. I chose the 1:55 pm screening that was priced as a matinee.
Unlike the last two times we went to the Grand to see Our Nixon in 2013 and A Hard Day's Night in 2014, this time we easily found parking along the curb across the street. We arrived at 1:20 pm, fairly early. One member of the Banned Book Club was already there in cinema 2. We sat on the right side toward the front. The cinema never got very crowded. There were probably only six or seven people in addition to our party of four. Before the film started they showed some still ads. The Grand might be one of the last cinemas to show still ads. One was for the Chihuly venetians at the Museum of Glass. We had seen that exhibit back in August and enjoyed it very much. There were two trailers. The first was for Suffragette starring Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, and Meryl Streep about women's fight for the right to vote in England. It included a great quote that went something like "War is the only language that you men understand." As one of us remarked, it was a very appropriate quote for He Named Me Malala. The second trailer was for a foreign film called something like The Second Mother. It seemed to be about a domestic servant whose young adult daughter visits her. The trailer didn't make it very clear what was going on.
The lights had dimmed for the trailers right on time at 1:55 pm. Just before the feature presentation, they showed the logo for Fox Searchlight. It had the same music as for Twentieth Century Fox. The movie did not have much music. I think only two songs were mentioned in the credits, one by Alicia Keys. The movie showed many interviews with Malala, several with her father Ziauddin, and a few with her mother and brothers. I already knew most of the content from reading her book but it really hit me to see it in images such as the broadcasts of the Taliban via Radio Mullah and the burning of videocassettes, DVD's, computers, and TV's. I liked seeing what the Swat Valley and Mingora actually looked like. They are green and beautiful as Malala describes, but also quite crowded. The images of the bus in which Malala and two other girls were shot looked even more terrifying than the picture in the book.
The movie includes a few aspects of Malala's story that aren't in the book such as her rehabilitation. It delves more into her schooling in Birmingham. It touches on her celebrity status and shows her and her father in the limelight. The movie tells some of her parents' histories. Ziauddin had a severe stammer and still occasionally stutters when he speaks in interviews. But the movie also shows him giving passionate speeches in either Urdu or Pashtun. It shows some of Malala's speeches as well. Some of the funniest and most touching parts are the interviews with Malala and her family. The segment where she shows the books in her bookcase is especially funny.
After the movie ended we walked over to Corina Bakery to discuss it. I got an orange-chocolate vegan cupcake and my wife got a majestic bar and an 8-ounce chai tea with a heart made of cream inside. We all liked the movie. My wife could still follow its jumbled format even though she hadn't read the book. One book club member had gone to school in England and even recognized one of the questions on Malala's GCSE exams. We talked about the scenes with Malala visiting the Syrian refugees and giving them schoolbooks. She also visits a school in Kenya and the parents of schoolgirls who were kidnapped in Nigeria. Malala really has a global reach now. We talked about how the movie has been received with mixed to good reviews. It showed some clips of interviews with Pakistanis about what they thought of Malala. They say she's a puppet of the West and believe that her father had actually written the book. The movie mentions that her book was banned in Pakistani private schools. The Taliban's method of interpreting the Quran for people reminded some of us of the movie The Book of Eli. We also discussed Malala's comment "I miss the dirty streets."
We talked for over an hour. It wasn't very crowded when we entered Corina Bakery but got very crowded with little kids in costumes and adult chaperones. We had a good Banned Book Club extracurricular outing. Our next regular discussion was the following Tuesday: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.
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