Gandhi
1982's GANDHI is the sort of film the Academy loved, and unsurprisingly awarded it Best Picture. But I would not call it "Oscar bait" (as it's known in the modern vernacular). Screenwriter John Briley and director Richard Attenborough are sensitive enough to memory of the beloved Mahatma Gandhi, leader of nonviolent resistance against the British in his homeland of India, to not make their movie a pandering bid for importance or notoriety. Didactic, maybe. Gandhi's life was characterized by demonstrations, jailings, fasts, repeat. Somehow the movie, by any definition an "epic", reminiscent of classic Hollywood even, feels like the small human drama bio the Mahatma would've approved of. The film opens with Gandhi's assassination in 1948 by a Hindu nationalist whose name we do not learn, but a cursory Internet search can remedy that. A massive funeral follows. Then we are on a train fifty five years earlier when Mohandas K. Gandh...
