2004 Foreign, Alternative and Independent Films - Page 8  

Lightning in a Bottle


A concert/documentary film of a blues concert at Radio City Music Hall in Febuary 2003. Musicians of today are featured, but they play and sing music of the entire spectrum, spanning everyone from Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Johnson to Jimi Hendrix. There is some archival film and recordings of performances by such as Ledbelly and Muddy Waters but the film focuses on the live performance.

Director Antoine Fuqua, the editor, cameramen and DP do a great job of capturing the energy of the music and the interplay and raw sexual presence of the performers.

This is a must-see for those who love the blues—but it should be avoided by anyone who dislikes this music. Those who are neither lovers nor haters, may well become lovers after watching the movie.

Pick a theater with a good sound system—and one where they are not afraid to crank up the volume.

Undertow

This is the second film I've seen by critical darling David Gordon Green, and I will not be seeing a third. Green is undeniably talented, but his interests don't interest me.

Green has often been compared to Terence Malick, and while I thought the comparison inapt for All the Real Girls, it suits Undertow (on which, appropriately enough, Malick is one of the producers). Green cares little about character and even less about plot. In his films, it's all about mood. Girls explored the pains and pleasures of small town life for people coming of age. Undertow works the more colorful territory of Southern gothic, and because the events are (potentially) so much more dramatic, the film is all the more maddening when experiences of conflict, jeopardy and violence are reduced to just moments in the flow of a cinematic tone poem. If you didn't mind the way World War II combat was handled in The Thin Red Line, this may be a film for you.

The film revolves around two sets of brothers: the adults, John and Deel (Dermot Mulroney and Josh Lucas), and John's sons, Tim and Chris (Devon Allen and Jamie Bell, a long way from Billy Elliot). The first 20-25 minutes establish the characters of John (cryptically stern), Tim (mysteriously ill, in a way that the audience quickly learns may be self-induced for reasons never explained), and Chris (rebellious and horny).

Then Uncle Deel appears bearing Josh Lucas' trademark glower. Ancient conflicts resurface, followed by violence and a pursuit that lasts the rest of the movie but never feels terribly urgent. New characters are introduced and often disappear with as little explanation as the abundant freeze-frames that seem to have become Green's preferred way of ending a scene. There is a McGuffin consisting of gold coins, which, according to family legend, were given to Tim and Chris's grandfather by Charon, the ferryman of the River Styx (no, I'm not making this up). The film has a resolution of sorts, but it feels neither earned nor satisfying.

Undertow has received glowing reviews from respectable critics, including Roger Ebert; so obviously Green is connecting to some viewers in a way that escapes me. I appreciate that the arthouse circuit provides an outlet for directors with such a singular vision, but it's not one I'm interested in seeking out again.

M.

Red Lights (Feux rouges)

For some reason, I thought I had reviewed this a while ago, but I guess that was one of the weeks when I ran out of time. It's been nearly two months since I saw it, but it keeps slipping back into my thoughts. It's no longer playing in New York City, but it may be making the arthouse rounds elsewhere, and I highly recommend it.

Red Lights is essentially a two-character drama in three acts. In the first, we get scenes from a marriage, the marriage being that of Antoine and Hélène, a couple played by Jean-Pierre Darroussin and former Bond girl Carole Bouquet (For Your Eyes Only). Trapped together in a car on a weekend road trip to pick up their children from camp, this is a couple who can barely suppress their conflicts -- and it doesn't help that Antoine has started drinking heavily even before they leave.

In the second act, Antoine and Hélène are separated, and we follow Antoine on a bizarre odyssey in which he alternately searches for Hélène and revels in the sudden freedom that he feels in her absence. As Antoine grows ever more reckless, you know that he's headed for trouble. To say more would be a spoiler.

In the third act, Antoine awakes from his drunken night and begins to search for Hélène in earnest. This leads to a tour-de-force sequence in which the director, Cédric Kahn, and his leading man create an astonishing mood of tension and urgency as Antoine does nothing more than stand at a bar and make phone call after phone call looking for his wife. Bad things have happened, some of which the audience knows, some of which they only suspect. The ending is, at best, bittersweet. (Again, to say more would be a spoiler.)

It's interesting to compare this film to another that it superficially (very superficially) resembles, Jonathan Mostow's Breakdown. The comparison says a lot about what differentiates Hollywood studio product from the arthouse circuit. In Breakdown, the characters are functional; they are filled in just enough to serve the machinations of the thriller plot, which is what the movie is about. In Red Lights, the thriller plot, such as it is, is not the end but merely the means to explore the characters and reveal their layers -- notably Antoine, who is very different by the end of the film. He's the same person, and Jean-Pierre Darroussin's exquisitely calibrated performance never lets you forget that. But now you know him a lot better, warts and all. You may even have come to like him. I did.

M.

Head in the Clouds

Charlize Theron in bed with Penelope Cruz, I had to forgo my star trek morals and force myself to see such filth. Theron plays Gilda, a free spirit who uses men to her advantage, and is the main mama in this story of a trio of lovers set adrift by the looming war with the Germans. Stuart Townsend plays the male lead and I found him to be pretty good and since he is Theron’s real boyfriend their affection appears more real. Cruz seemed a littlie dippy at times without a clearly written character but she sure looked sultry with her sexy self.

This story is long and reminded me of the red violin, just went on and on and in the end I think it paid off. I never would have guessed the sad ending and it made the journey well worth it. I did care what happened to the main characters since I watched them for so long and Theron’s performance is really good.

I don’t think this is great or really full of depth, but it is a decent story that held my attention until the end.

C+

Kinsey

Given this film's Oscar hopes (which are well-justified), I expect it will have its own thread soon enough. But it's a Fox Searchlight film currently playing in five theaters, and I think it belongs here.

There's already controversy over the accuracy of the film's portrayal of sex research pioneer Alfred Kinsey, and that's not surprising. Kinsey was probably more responsible than anyone (including Hugh Hefner) for the so-called sexual revoluation of late 20th century America. One's attitude toward Kinsey is very much a product of how one feels about that trend. What should not be controversial is the qualiy of writer-director Bill Condon's film, which is superbly crafted and brilliantly performed.

Condon doesn't make the mistake of trying to avoid bio-pic cliches -- on the contrary, he embraces them and makes them work to his advantage. His subject was a man who interviewed thousands of people about their sexual histories; so Condon opens the film with Kinsey being interviewed by several of his assistants as a training exercise. It's an efficient narrative device that, coupled with flashbacks, very quickly gives us a portrait of Kinsey as he was just beginning the landmark studies of sexual behavior that, for better or worse, are his legacy.

Liam Neeson's portrayal of Kinsey is extraordinary. It may suffer during awards season, because Neeson doesn't hesitate to make the audience uncomfortable. There's something unsettling in the single-minded devotion of this fundamentally shy individual to digging out the most intimate secrets in people's lives -- his own and everyone else's. In his own way, Kinsey was as rigorous, uncompromising and ultimately insensitive as the puritanical father (played by John Lithgow) against whom he rebelled. There is a key scene in the latter part of the film where Kinsey and an assistant interview a voracious sexual explorer played by William Sadler, who, like Kinsey, is obsessed with documenting his explorations. When it emerges that those explorations included pedophilia, Kinsey's assistant, despite all the training in objectivity and detachment, leaves the room in disgust. But Kinsey remains and listens. The scene is the film's way of showing that scientific detachment has its perils.

Of equal caliber is Laura Linney's potrayal of Clara Kinsey, who is, if anything, an even more complicated character than her husband. In scene after scene, Neeson and Linney draw you into the inner world of what had to be one of the more unusual marriages of its time. The scene where Kinsey confesses a homosexual encounter with one of his assistants (another exceptional portrayal by Peter Sarsgaard) is equal parts moving and disturbing. The later scene where Clara herself has an open fling with the same assistant is both disturbing and very funny. It takes an extraordinary cast and a very sure directorial hand to get away with this material and not lose the audience.

Kinsey's landmark 1948 publication Sexual Behavior in the Human Male made him a household name, and the film deftly covers that development (complete with Cole Porter lyrics!) and the inevitable backlash that followed. Given the national debate about "values" in which we are now engaged, the film actually seems more timely than perhaps it did when the project was first conceived. There is no doubt where the film's sympathies lie -- Kinsey's chief nemesis on the faculty at Indiana University is played by Tim Curry as a repressive buffoon (which is pretty funny if you remember him as Frank 'N' Furter) -- and the film could easily become a contemporary lightning rod. But even if one disapproves of Kinsey, the bell that he rang can't be unrung. As he says in the film, there is an enormous gap between what people imagine sexual experience to be and what it is, and the film provides numerous examples. (Interview question to a couple: "How many sexual positions have you tried?" Answer: "There's more than one?") One only has to look at contemporary popular culture to realize that perception today is very different.

The film's production values are extraordinary given the limited budget. The film has a rich period look that transports you back into an era of much greater formality and reserve. The cinematography by Frederick Elmes (whose work I always enjoy) casts an odd kind of serenity over scene after scene in which mighty forces are churning just under the surface.

As an aside: I'd love to know how they got some of these scenes past the MPAA. I can't remember a recent film from a major studio that had so much male full frontal nudity. The scene with Kinsey lecturing to a room full of students shocked by the explicit photographs he's projecting in giant enlargements is almost guaranteed to have people in the theater audience squirming. But writer-director Condon is smart enough to relieve the tension with a joke, which I won't spoil here.

M.

Finding Neverland

It's beautifully acted, expertly directed and features some gorgeous scenery. But it left me cold. Maybe it's because I've never been a big fan of the Peter Pan story. If one isn't enchanted by the Neverland saga, one isn't likely to be enchanted by the experience of someone conjuring it up.

Still, I wasn't bored and, more importantly, I wasn't uncomfortable watching this (heavily fictionalized) story of how English playwright J.M. Barrie inserted himself into the Davies family and used them as raw material for his most successful creation. In different hands, both behind and in front of the camera, this could have been downright creepy. Johnny Depp's portrayal of Barrie is so winning, and Marc Forster's direction is so assured, that the more questionable elements of the story remain banished to the edges. It's also good to have Dustin Hoffman (as Barrie's producer) and Julie Christie (as the Davies grandmother), because their characters supply a needed dose of skepticism and a tartness that helps cut the sentimentality.

I doubt Johnny Depp will win the Oscar for this film, unless it's considered some sort of make-up. But he's always interesting to watch, and this film is no exception. I can't quite bring myself to recommend this, but I don't think you'll feel the time was wasted.

M.

Overnight -

The title of Tony Montana's and Mark Brian Smith's Overnight implies some sort of change, but the truth is that Boondock Saints writer/director Troy Duffy was probably a jerk before he got a movie deal. That said, his unpleasantness is right out there for the world to see - one must infer it for Montana and Smith.

The movie starts with news coverage of the deal that Troy Duffy signed with Miramax - where he would not only get to direct his screenplay, but his band would do the soundtrack, he would have casting approval, and Harvey Weinstein was buying him the pub where he'd been tending bar for good measure. His band, The Brood, includes his brother Taylor and a couple others; this documentary's directors are the band's co-managers. They probably intend for this documentary, started in 1997, to cover Duffy's rise.

Duffy is full of himself, though, and soon alienates people at Miramax. The band's record deal evaporates, and he lashes out at Tony and Mark, saying that they don't deserve to get paid for what little they'd done for the band, that all the group's success came from him. This is likely the moment where Overnight stopped being a documentary and started being a hatchet job.

One might wonder, though, why Montana and Smith kept up with it, or why Duffy let them keep following him around. If I'd basically been called worthless and told I wasn't getting paid for my services, I'd be looking for actual gainful employment. But, then, I'm not a hanger-on, which seems to be the best way to describe Montana and Smith based upon what we see in their movie. And apparently hell hath no fury like that of a pair of hangers-on scorned. They take great delight in showing Duffy getting his come-uppance, and because Duffy is a pompous ass, the audience enjoys it too. As to why Duffy let them keep following him around, well, I've never had hangers-on, either. Losing them must be like losing some sort of ongoing validation that you're important and matter.

But, underneath it all, I couldn't help but find something I liked about Duffy. I never want to meet him, or work with him, mind you, but I can't help but admire that when all is said and done, he made a movie, one which has something of a cult following, and wound up doing it for half the budget he'd originally planned on having. He doesn't seem too bright (he didn't get a piece of the TV and video action where the movie has made most of its money), and he made a classic mistake: He didn't realize that the industry was filled with people smarter than he was - or if he did, he thought being hard-headed would be enough. His perception that he could make it by being as big a bully as the Harvey Weinsteins he met up with didn't bear out, but it's born out of the same drive that made him a worthy documentary subject in the first place.

So... now that I've gotten through my emotional reaction to the subject matter, I suppose it's time to say what I thought of Overnight as a film. It's not bad at all, once you've made the adjustments for who is making it and their readily apparent antipathy for their subject. The film compresses five years of time into an hour and a half, and they must have had a lot of footage to sift through. The editors do a great job constructing a coherent, attention-keeping narrative from that raw material. There is, of course, the question of selective endpoints - the film sort of treats the Boondock Saints screenplay as something which came into existence on its own, giving no indication that writing it must have been hard work, or really any depiction of who Duffy was before the fame/infamy. The IMDB shows Duffy at work on a sequel to Boondock Saints, but you'd never know he was anything but finished by the end of Overnight.

Overnight is an entertaining movie and a useful parable about a man living the dream and then pissing it away because he couldn't grasp how lucky he was. You'll laugh at Troy Duffy and probably come away with some small feeling of moral superiority. Just keep in mind the likely motivations of the filmmakers.

---

The Machinist -

Man, Brad Anderson has gotten dark. He's good at it, but I'm starting to wonder if he's got another Next Stop Wonderland or Happy Accidents in him.

This is Anderson's first feature based upon another person's screenplay, and it's fairly clear. His previous films had a much more evident spark of creativity to them, whether it be the background Sam claims in Accidents or the literally dangerous atmosphere to the mental hospital in Session 9. Writer Scott Kosar's other credits are for horror movie remakes, and certain elements of The Machinist will seem very familiar.

The story unfolds at a leisurely pace. Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale) is a machinist at a tool and die company who hasn't been able to sleep for a year. He tries, but it just doesn't happen, and he fills his time off the floor by seeing a hooker (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and by coffee and conversation with a waitress (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) at an airport diner. His apartment is sparse, devoid of any ornament, and he's wasting away - both women remark that if he were any thinner, he wouldn't exist. Soon, though, a man named Ivan (John Sharian) appears at his workplace, and when he distracts Trevor at one point, it sets of an accident that causes a co-worker to lose an arm. During the insurance investigation, though, Trevor is told that Ivan doesn't exist.

It's not terribly difficult to predict the trajectory of the movie after this - Reznik will get paranoid, he'll be shunned at work, and the audience will figure out well ahead of Reznik that someone who has gone seven thousand hours without sleep may not have the most reliable perspective on any given situation. That hampers the movie a bit, because when the audience knows something terribly obvious that the main character obviously doesn't, that character is always going to be a step or three behind. The only way for the audience not to feel frustrated with how dim the protagonist is then becomes "withheld information", which merely delays aggravation.

Anderson makes the movie visually striking, though - the desaturated colors are a good indicator of how numb Reznik seems to be growing to the world, with the occasional object rendered in full color (such as Ivan's red convertible) thus seeming to have significance. A sequence in an amusement park house-of-horrors ride is certainly disturbing. And the way in which Reznik opts to make his claim of a hit and run believable enough for the police to give him information on Ivan is not for the squeamish.

Still, the most talked-about visual in the movie is Christian Bale's insane weight loss. Dropping a third of the mass from his six-foot-two frame to a final weight of 130 pounds, Bale is so skinny as to make the audience uncomfortable. Heck, he tripped my reality filter - I looked at him and thought "that's a CGI effect; he doesn't look human". It certainly makes Reznik look like a ghost, fading away from his life. It occasionally overshadows the story and character, though, making me feel more like I was watching a freakshow than a movie.

And it can't be healthy. If I ever hear of my theater-major brother doing something like this for a role, I will call our mother and make sure that he is inundated with cookies and pies and cakes until he relents.

The story is of the variety that comes together well enough by the end, but starts to look a little less plausible about ten minutes later. As with many unreliable-narrator stories, that's when you can start to piece together what literally happened and what may not have, and that's fine, but when you try to figure out where the stuff that may not have comes from, why it interjects itself into Reznik's mind at that point and in that way, that's a little trickier.

Whether you ultimately like or dislike the movie, Bale's emaciated body will stick in your mind, probably well after the somewhat derivative story and decent performances fade.

Being Julia

This is a movie that is outside my comfort zone and I really had no idea if I would like or dislike it. I can say by the end of this film my initial discomfort vanished and I found myself absorbed within the story. I felt like I left the theater seat and traveled to England to witness this story and returned without the jetlag or the expense. When this happens it really is special and so much more rewarding then those times when you’re just looking at surround placement and counting track lights on the floor. If this is in your area, I recommend you give it a try.

Annette Bening is radiant in this piece with wonderful looking shots that catch her in all her beauty. She had a lot of dialog and she delivered it with great enthusiasm and energy that carried until the final scene. Her son, played by Tom Sturridge is also quite stunning to look at and he really had a nice way about him that made me want to see more of him. Jeremy Irons played the husband/producer and he delivered an excellent performance with the limited allotted screen time given to him. The young lover Tom played by Shaun Evans was good initially, but he seemed to act really poorly after their breakup and by the end became a true eyesore.

Julia the ultimate stage actress performs the lead role for London’s artsy crowd in a play that is produced by her boss/husband played by Jeremy Irons. They are in their middle 40’s and have a teenage son that is attempting to forge his own path different from his parents. Julia/Michael’s relationship is built upon their united commitment to deliver a great show and this is what both desire the most. Julia receives inspiration for her characters from her escapades outside her marriage and is introduced to Tom a 20ish year old lifelong fan and newly hired yank played by Shaun Evans. He becomes her newest muse when her current fling with Lord Charles played by Bruce Greenwood abruptly ends due to his fear of bad publicity and his desire to travel abroad. Julia and Tom’s fling is fun for a while but eventually comes to a grinding halt when her young lover’s interest sways toward an actress his own age. Julia finds herself in competition with this younger actress who is on her way up and she on her way down. Tired and performing poorly as her husband insists, she returns to her hometown in Jersey and tries to recover physically and mentally. While in Jersey she unites with Lord Charles and gains insight as to why he ended their former relationship and why he is unwilling to rekindle their passion. Julia returns to England to find her husband entangled in a twist that really motivates her to deliver a stunning ad lib performance that exposes all involved and that ultimately brings down the house.

B

Sideways

Miles played by Paul Giamatti is recently divorced and officially bummed out. He is about to take his buddy Jack played by Thomas Haden on a relaxing driving trip to sample some wine and play a little golf before his ensuing wedding to a wealthy Armenian beauty. Miles is a schoolteacher who has been trying to complete/publish his book and is hoping for that big break. Jack is a hardly working actor that is looking to marry for security and is an amateur when it comes to wine. Jacks idea of fun is a little more adventurous then miles, and Jack feels it’s his duty to get Miles out of his rut by finding him a love interest.

This was better then expected, seen some good reviews and figured it wouldn’t live up to them, but thankfully it does. I know absolutely nothing about wine but I appreciate the passion these characters displayed about their hobby.

The camera was put real close to the characters during most scenes and this provided a very intimate setting which helped draw me in to their little world. Washed out sun shots preventing me from un-focusing on what was immediately taking place and helped zone me in on what the characters were doing. I was impressed with the dark motel scene, Jack returns naked to the motel and wakes Miles and it was extremely dark. This is usually lit too much which doesn’t convey the dead of night but this sure did. The scenery shown as Miles and Jack drive from winery to winery was beautiful and relaxing with gorgeous vineyards and a rolling countryside, it felt like I was really there with them.

I found this movie to be very funny, and it really sparked laughter from different people at different times, fun to see with a full theater. Look for Bush & friends on the television during the wallet scene. I don’t think kids would enjoy this movie much as it seems to be for adults only. There is a frontal nude shot of a man in one scene and a couple of semi naked scenes so if this bothers you then prepare to close your eyes.

This movie is for those who enjoy watching not so perfect humans attempting to deal with their not so perfect lives utilizing there under funded arsenal of life skills. You get a little love story mixed with a dash of sophomoric humor aged in a cellar to create a fine film.

A

There are many well-written reviews in this thread that probably go unnoticed by many HTF members that don't frequent this area of the forum much, unless, it's to read a specific review of a film in one of the official review threads. It's too bad some of the reviews of limited released films that have been expanded to general release can't by copy to those official review threads. That way, more people can take notice of some excellent films they might not be aware of or didn't notice due to them not reading this particular thread.





Crawdaddy

Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst

If you're old enough to remember the events recounted in Robert Stone's documentary, the film will bring back vivid memories of a time when the terrorists most feared in America were home-grown. If you only know the Hearst kidnapping as a historical event, the film will give you much of the audio and video that night after night made the lead story on the evening news. Stone has expertly combined the extensive archival footage with recent interviews of Michael Bortin and Russell Little, two former members of the Symbionese Liberation Army that kidnapped Hearst and which she ultimately joined (whether or not by choice is still subject to debate).

Neither Bortin nor Little was involved in the actual kidnapping, but they knew the people who were. Little is an especially interesting and articulate subject, who reportedly had never been interviewed before Stone persuaded him to talk. He was an early member of the SLA but was in prison (for killing the Oakland school superintendent) when his comrades abducted Hearst. Like the rest of the nation, he watched in astonishment as his former comrades forced the Hearst family to ransom their daughter by giving away millions of dollars of free food (which led to a riot), only to have that same daughter suddenly issue communiques denouncing her family and swearing allegiance to her captors and their cause. The footage of Hearst brandishing a machine gun that was captured by a security camera in a Hibernia bank branch became one of the most famous clips of the 1970s, and at this historical remove, it's hard to convey just how surreal it seemed at the time.

The film traces how the SLA, which at first seemed invincible, eventually was undone by sheer amateurishness, with one of the major breaks in the case resulting from founding member Bill Harris' attempt to shoplift socks at Mel's Sporting Goods in Inglewood. The self-styled urban guerillas who had terrorized San Francisco were no match for the L.A. police, who didn't hesitate to burn down the house in which they'd taken refuge. Eventually Hearst and other fleeing members were caught, and Hearst served nearly two years in prison before having her sentence commuted by Jimmy Carter (she would eventually receive a full pardon from Bill Clinton).

The Hearst case was the first modern-style media frenzy, and the film notes that it occurred just as mobile video technology had progressed to the point where fast-breaking events could be relayed live to the nation. Even with all the subsequent events that have monopolized the headlines for a time and then vanished, the Hearst story remains one of the strangest. Stone has done an excellent job of assembling all of the important audio and video, and the interviews with Little and Bortin (and with journalist Tim Findley, who covered the story in San Francisco) provide both context and historical perspective. Hearst herself was not interviewed, and it's unlikely she would have deviated from the story she told in her book (surprise, surprise: she was brainwashed). Stone wisely doesn't try to take a position on Hearst's culpability; he simply ends the film with title cards noting that Hearst got a pardon and almost everyone else who survived went to jail (Little eventually won an acquittal on a retrial).

The film is currently playing in New York, LA and San Francisco. Additional cities are scheduled for December and January through the Landmark Theater chain. The film's website has a list.

M.

Sigh...Edwin, I don't think Fahrenheit 9/11 is a "documentary" per se. Neither is Fahrnehype 9/11.

BTW, I don't think it is inherent upon any doc to be "balanced".

I don't recommend either of the above. I suggest people try to rent or see Hijacking Disaster, produced by the Media Education Foundation. www.mef.org

Let's nip this in the bud.

HTF's rules for this topic are unchanged. Anyone who wants to state (or repeat) their views on Fahrenheit 9/11 should go to the official threads and follow the guidelines. We are not revisiting that topic here.

M.

We be readin', we be readin'...

--
H

Zelary

Eliska, a young Czech woman played by Anna Geislerova works in the city as a nurse and a member of the resistance movement. This movement plots secretly against the Nazi regimes that have occupied their country during the 1940’s. Eliska is getting bored with the little tasks they ask her to complete and she looks forward to missions that are more challenging and more adventurous. Her boyfriend Richard played by Ivan Trojan is a surgeon at the city hospital where she works and is well respected in his field and in the movement. Eliska’s way of life ends abruptly after members of the resistance are captured and the threat of disclosure become eminent for all involved. The resistance reacts to this news by relocating and obtaining new identities for those that potentially may be reveled. With Richard already removed Eliska sees no other choice but to go to her assigned location, an untouched village in the mountainside called Zelary. Her protector and guide to this sanctuary is Joza played by Gyorgy Cserhelmi a local resident of Zelary who owes his life to the medical duo after a recent life-threatening operation. Eliska now called Hana is forced to marry Joza out of necessity, due to the fact that the residents would not accept her as one of them unless she married him. Hana spends a good amount of time attempting to adapt to her new lifestyle, which is vastly different from her former city life. Eventually the people of Zelary find themselves tested by inside and outside influences, which change their lives forever.

Visually it is beautiful with wonderful mountain views and plenty of healthy looking trees. This looked so relaxing and peaceful that I instantly wanted to leave my theater seat and book a vacation there.

This is a subtitled movie and at times it is hard to see some of the words because they blend into the wonderful backgrounds. I found it a little hard to keep up in the beginning due to such unfamiliar character names and surroundings, but once into it I had no problem.

This movie is pretty good but not great. The characters are developed awesomely but the overall story is a little lackluster, with some scenes requiring trimmings and others in need of insertions. This movie runs 2 hours and 28 min. and it feels like 3 hours easy, so prepare appropriately.

B-

Bad Education

I don't know Pedro Almodóvar's work well enough to say this is the darkest film he's ever made, but it's the darkest of his I've ever seen. With nods to both film noir and Hitchcock, the film is about bad people doing bad things to each other, but it still manages to be a lot of fun. Almodóvar's technical and narrative skill has reached such heights that he can fully indulge his penchant for reinventing (and even restarting) the story as he goes along, without ever losing control. He whips your head around with flashbacks, unreliable narrators (yes, more than one), a film-within-a-film that isn't really a film but a director imagining one as he reads a short story -- and yet by the end you do know what happened (and it isn't a pretty picture).

After a title sequence that's a wonderful homage to Saul Bass's titles for Psycho (accompanied by a score that expertly references Bernard Hermann), we are introduced to Enrique, a film director in the Madrid of 1980 who is scouring tabloids for inspiration. At his door arrives Ignacio, a friend he hasn't seen since they were boys at school. Ignacio is an actor who wants two things: always to be called "Angel" and to have Enrique put him in a film based on a short story of his own that he gives Enrique to read. As Enrique becomes absorbed in the story, he imagines the film that it might become; suddenly the colors on screen are different and the aspect ratio changes as we enter Enrique's imagination. For the rest of the film, fact and imagination get harder and harder to separate.

Ignacio's story is an autobiography about himself and Enrique. As young boys, they fell in love at school, but were separated by a teacher, Father Manolo -- not because he objected to their homosexuality but because he wanted Ignacio for himself. With Enrique out of the way, Father Manolo achieved his objective. Later in the film, we meet Manolo, who is no longer a priest, and while he does not deny the involvement with Ignacio, he tells a radically different story of the aftermath. Identities overlap and get confused, in part because people are lying and in part because Almodóvar casts Gael Garcia Bernal in multiple roles -- as Ignacio, as the transvestite singer Zahara in Ignacio's story and as . . . someone else. This being Almodóvar's version of film noir, there's a murder, but who gets killed and why are just as mysterious and complicated as who does the killing.

Bad Education has been billed as a critique of the abuses in religious schools of the post-Franco era, and that's accurate as far as it goes. But to me it's more a classic tale of deception and revenge; it just happens to be set in Spain and to be told by someone who obviously appreciates the classics but is so confident in his own mastery of the medium that the classics are just so much material with which to express his own vision. This is one of those films like Double Indemnity where everything stinks but it's exhilarating to watch it all play out.

In another example of the MPAA's arbitrariness, the film is rated NC-17, even though it's less explicit than, say, Kinsey, which is rated R. No one would ever admit it, but I'm sure the rating resulted from the fact that all of the sexual activity depicted in the film is between males. Since the rating will no doubt limit the distribution, the film may be hard to find, but it's worth it.

M.

Screaming Men (Huutajat) - ½

Screaming Men is a documentary about a group - the Finnish Screaming Male Choir - that, like their leader Petri Sirviö, takes pride in its absurdity. The opening, in which Petri is joined by his choir on a glacier (they arrive by icebreaker), has a portentious appearance which is gleefully mixed with the silliness of one of the members constructing his rubber tie by attacking a tire liner with a pair of scissors.

Here's the thing, though - absurdity and silliness aren't enough to sustain even this film's 76-minute running time unless there's something behind them. Sometimes it can be a point to be made, and sometimes pure artistic inspiration is enough. And while one can, if one tries hard enough, find a certain meaning in Sirviö's creations - a large part of their repetoire is national anthems, and having them shouted at you does tend to emphasize their generally martial nature - what is most striking is Sirviö's ability as a composer/arranger. He has managed to take perhaps the crudest tools available to a musician - a group of men with little musical training (one applicant mentions that he is just looking to find a way to fill time) and loud voices - and created interesting performance pieces. At one point, the choir is literally yelling a section of the tax code unaccompanied, and it's good music.

Writer/director Mika Ronkainen is a former(?) member of the group, and his affection for it and its leader comes through loud and clear. He shares the same quirky sense of humor, too, using bits of wordless stock footage to finish sentences and using irony to set the scene of the Choir's hometown of Oulu (a line about the city being at the forefront of high technology shows an Atari 800 or Commodore 64 running Music Construction Set). This film is another that can be misconstrued as being fun because it doesn't take itself seriously, but both Rokainen and Sirviö do, in fact, take their work seriously - they just recognize that humor is intrinsic to that work. The bookend sequences with the icebreaker alone was dissected at length at the eye-opener discussion afterward, and as the choir travels the world, their program is adapted for not just the city in which they play, but often (only days before the performance) for the facility as well.

The "Male" in the choir's name is no extraneous adjective; though the women in the audience clearly enjoyed both the subject matter and the documentary, participation is clearly A Guy Thing. The members are scruffy, working-class guys who sweat like pigs (Sirviö brings up the smell in several interviews) and unwind with fart jokes. There's a very Monty Python-ish feel to some of their interactions with their audience - a "lecture on screaming" Sirviö gives in Tokyo is especially amusing.

Though the title refers to the Choir as a whole, the focus mainly stays upon its leader. Petri Sirviö is, in fact, a trained musician, but a hand injury ended his career as a bass player early. He spends a lot of time talking about his family and how they wish he would do fewer international tours; he's a contrast to the other members. It's not an overwhelming focus, but the bond Ronkainen does create with the audience is in large part to Petri.

After seeing this feature, much of the audience wanted to know what it would take to book the group for a Boston show or two. Watching Screaming Men likely won't change the audience in any meaningful way, but it will entertain them with both interesting subject matter and presentation.

Michael, I'm an Almodóvar fan from way back and having seen all of his films, Bad Education is definitely one of his darkest, with Matador being the only other film that comes close. All of the characters are equally sympathetic as they are reprehensible. To be honest, while his last few films (specifically All About My Mother and Talk to Her) have been more polished and technically superior to his earlier films, I've always been a bit of a detractor to his later work because they did seem to have lost that "darkness" that pervaded his earlier films. Bad Education is a nice amalgam of his earlier and later styles...maybe not his best (I still prefer Matador and Law of Desire), but it's definitely in the right direction.

By the way, at the NYFF Q&A, Almodóvar also talked about the look of the "peeling billboards" title sequence and how it also reflected the "fragments of stories" approach that he uses to tell the story. Bad Education definitely represents his most structurally complex narrative strategy to date. It's brilliant.

Regarding Huutajat, a friend of mine pointed me to their website awhile ago so I'm keen on seeing this. The website has some audio and video clips so you can get an idea about what they sound like. Definitely different...Thanks for the pointer Jason - don't think I would have heard of this otherwise.

Along the lines of little heard of 2004 independent documentaries, has anyone seen Parallel Lines? Caught this on CBC Newsworld sometime ago and it's a really fine little film. I say little because it's one young woman's document of her drive across the U.S. following 9/11. She's a New Yorker who was working in San Diego at the time of the tragedy and decided to drive home the long way...

Along that way, she interviews different people about how 9/11 affected them. The range of characters she encounters is quite extraordinary. As with the best documentaries, the story isn't really the main issue, it's the people you meet along the way. These folks range from an elderly San Diego man who states that the event had little to no impact on him, to some relatively scary racists in one of the Southern states (though even they come across as pretty complex) to some policemen in Washington DC who tell the young lady that she cannot film from her car ("You just can't do that anymore...").

I found her charming and quite open with the people she meets and in the end it paints a quite interesting story of the country she just traveled across and the people within it.

Screaming Men isn't exactly easy to find - I saw it at a Sunday morning movie club screening of a R2 DVD; I believe that's what the current engagement at Coolidge Corner in Brookline is running, too. It's got no American distribution at all, which is a shame.

To my surprise I loved J-P Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement as I was left decidedly cold by Jeunet's previous film, Amelie, which I found to be derivative fluff.

A Very Long Engagement is an epic anti-war film (set during and after WWI) and love story, done with great style and passion.

Audrey Tautou plays a woman who's fiance is presumed dead at the front -- but she loves him and won't give until she finds exactly what happened to him. Thus a detective story, full of flashbacks, that is both very moving and entertaining.

Highly recommended.

Ted

Me too! (On both films. ) I have a partly written review here, which I keep trying to find the spare time to finish.

M.

I loved Amelie, so I've been looking forward to A Very Long Engagement since I first heard about it. Despite Ted and Michael's comments about Amelie, I'll still go see it.

With apologies to Bob , here's the review I started yesterday (while stuck in a dull and endless meeting) and finished today:

A Very Long Engagement

I loathed Amélie; so when I read that director Jean-Pierre Jeunet was reuniting with leading lady Audrey Tatou, I was unenthused. But the trailer for A Very Long Engagement persuaded me to take a chance, and I'm glad I did. It's one of the year's best films.

The film is a love story and a big-scale war story -- or, more precisely, an anti-war story. It's set in France during and immediately after World War I -- the so-called "Great War" that ushered in the modern era for Europe and America, and that has always been a fertile source for anti-war stories (a discussion of why would be too big a digression). The film opens with five French soldiers who have been sentenced to death for deliberately injuring themselves to obtain a discharge. As in Amélie, there's a genial omniscient narrator who introduces each man, with flashbacks to give us the history. The film continues to move forward and backward in time, until we ultimately learn what became of each of these five men.

The fifth man is Manech, a young farm boy whose fiance, Mathilde (Tatou), cannot be dissuaded from looking for him after the war. According to official French records, Manech is dead, but Mathilde will not accept that. Manech and Mathilde were childhood friends, then sweethearts, and throughout the film we get fragments of their lives before the war. Mathilde's search will lead her through conflicting stories, fragmentary records, mistaken identities and a vendetta by someone who loved one of the other men condemned with Manech (Jeunet is bold enough to show us two elaborate murders before explaining why they were committed or, in one case, even who is being killed -- somehow it works). Mathilde may be just a superstitious country girl, but she is second to none in determination. A victim of childhood polio who walks with a limp, she is not above exaggerating her disability to wheedle cooperation when nothing else will work.

Jeunet doesn't stint on showing the gore and the horrors of war, but the tone of the film still manages to be poetic and magical, with grace notes of comedy to lighten the grim truths that Mathilde's investigation uncovers. The visual style is epic and intimate at the same time, and the images are often loveliest when the events onscreen are most horrific. There's a fiery explosion near the end that you know is coming -- because a character has already referred to it -- but Jeunet builds to it with technique worthy of Hitchcock. As sheer cinema, the scene is glorious; as a depiction of something that probably happened to real people in wartime, it's sickening. I haven't seen anything that gave me such contradictory sensations since Apocalypse Now (which otherwise bears no similarity to Jeunet's work).

The title of the film hints at its conclusion, but it's still not what you expect. The film doesn't cheat. It respects the damage that organized slaughter imposes on both the living and the dead, but it allows Mathilde's quest to be resolved in a way that's surprisingly satisfying. You leave the theater with a renewed sense of how fragile love is, and yet how powerful. I never felt that Amélie earned its sweetness; this film does and then some.

Although foreign language films don't often get a wide release, this one has major award potential and may be an exception. If Warner Independent Pictures decides to mount a big ad campaign, don't be surprised if they play up Jodie Foster's role, which is relatively minor. She plays a widow (of whom is somewhat complicated), and she's good as always. But it's a small part and no more important than the many other personalities that people the story. The entire cast is first-rate. So is the score by David Lynch regular, Angelo Badalamenti.

M.

Helluva slate for best feature. I'm glad I don't have to make a choice!

M.

Well if they weren't already, the ISA are becoming as safe and boring as the Academy Awards.

The Motorcycle Diaries

Alberto Granado and Ernesto Guevara de la Serna pardoned from their scholastic studies gather their belongings and hop aboard a seasoned motorcycle for an 8k-mile trip across South America. Slowly starting as just another boys night out, the duo find themselves effected by their shared journey which culminates into a clearer vision of where each wishes to be in the post trip future.

Beautifully shot and well acted I could not help but enjoy this film. Easy to read and understand this is a very rewarding movie to see with a wonderful chemistry between the two main actors. Actually I liked all the characters and enjoyed getting to know each in their respective element. Emotionally along for the ride, I transcended the motorbike as did the characters and experienced the highs and lows this journey provided. In the end I actually cared for both characters and enjoyed my time watching them in this film.

A