The Well Digger's Daughter (Thursday, July 12, 2012) (63)

Perhaps best known for Claude Berri's two 1986 adaptations of his novels, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, Marcel Pagnol remains one of the most important romantic writers and filmmakers of the pre-War era in France. Described by Jean Renoir as "an author of genius," Pagnol mostly wrote about early-mid-twentieth century rural France and all the colorful, modest and immodest people who live there.

Daniel Auteuil, who played Ugolin, the stubborn farmer in Jean de Florette, makes his writing and directoral debut with an adaptation of Pagnol's The Well Digger's Daughter, a light story that seems to fall in perfect like with the films of Berri, not to mention the lighter fare of Renoir or Pagnol himself.

Pascal Amoretti (Auteuil) is a very proud well digger in southern France. His devoted daughter, Patricia (the absolutely gorgeous Astrid Berges-Frisbey), takes care of him and his passel of young kids now that the mother is dead. Due to some quick economic figuring, Patricia had been partly raised in Paris by a rich lady and only came back south recently. Because of her brief flirtation with bourgeoisdom, she tilts her head a bit too far up and has a slightly fancy air about her.

She meets Jacques Mazel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), the son of the local grocery store owner and a dandy and a total snob. He woos her and she gives in quickly -- and they have a quick fling in the hay loft. He is then sent off to War (WWI) suddenly and is unable to tell her he loves her, etc. She becomes doubly sad, not just losing her boyfriend, but also because she gets pregnant from their tumble.

Pascal and her go to the Mazel house to ask for help, but they turn them away, seeing them as gold diggers. When news arrives that Jacques has died in battle, Pascal sets himself to raising his grandson with pride in his family and a bitterness for others.

There is a lot of discussion here about classism, sinful pride and snobbery and how it comes in all shapes and sizes from all directions. At first the Amorettis are treated badly by the Mazel's for being poor, but then Pascal responds by treating them with contempt for being out of touch. Jacques and Patricia's relationship, though brief, is filled with each one trying to gain upper-hand through money, body or psychology.

This film plays mostly as a charming chamber piece, light and funny at times and melodramatic at others. It is a very good movie with a seemingly timeless story, although it is not really brilliant and feels ultimately small and sometimes too shallow. Still, it's enjoyable and done in a very clean, naturalistic way.

Stars: 3 of 4

Polisse (Monday, May 28, 2012) (50)

Movies and TV shows about cops make it clear that police work is really hard. Totally unrelated to that is the fact that kids are really cute. If you could somehow combine these two elements (kids and cops) you'd have a movie about how hard it is for cops to help kids (particularly those who are being molested and raped). Well, there is such a movie and it's writer/director/actress Maiwenn's Polisse.

This cinema-verité-style look into the Parisian police's Child Protection Unit (that also deals with the white slavery part of Vice) feels very much like a number of cop shows we've seen for years on TV (Homocide, The Wire, the "law" part of Law & Order) and doesn't have any more through-line plot than six episodes of any of those shows strung together one after the other.

The structure of the film basically has a child or parent visit the police station to introduce a case and meet with some members of the CPU team (there are about eight officers in the unit, a very diverse group of men and women). We then see how the team takes down the perpetrator or organization that's doing whatever it's doing to the innocents. Each of these sequences ends with the group of cops going out to blow off steam as a group, in bars and clubs or at the homes of one another.

They each battle small demons of their own (one is anorexic, one is getting a divorce, one is already divorced, although she regrets it, two are interested in dating, despite the fact that one of them is pregnant with her husband's baby) and seem to take the interactions with the kids very personally and hard. Maiwenn herself plays a photojournalist who is documenting the team for an art project... and trying to stay objective as she falls in love with one of the cops.

There are some wonderful moments of comedy (dark comedy, but funny) and tragedy, supported by some really wonderful acting. Karin Viard plays Nadine, one of the senior members of the team, is particularly good, although she's helped by her character being the most deeply developed. Frederic Pierrot plays Baloo, the leader of the group, and does it beautifully. Still, the film feels much more like a list of situations than a single particular story. There no connection from one episode to the next and kids who we get to know briefly and seemingly deeply vanish once their situation is solved.

Clearly this is a commentary on cinematic plot structure and a way of getting the audience to identify more with the cops. Maiwenn is specifically putting us in the position of the cops who can't totally remain connected to any individual kid because they will be gone soon and a new case will come up. The main problem with this is the the cops do seem to connect deeply to the kids, forcing us to connect in a rather forced situational way. Kids being cute make us immediately love them -- they're total proxy emotion devices. That the cops in the film connect to them is not really the same thing as when we connect to them. In principle they're connecting to the human being, while we're connecting to the idea of a "kid in trouble". This dissimilarity in our relationships to the children only goes to shed light on a major flaw in the film.

I am predisposed to hate movies about "kids in trouble" because they're cheap and emotionally insincere. This, however, is a good movie with some great stuff in it. I wish it had more structure to help guide our connections and feelings in a more purposeful way. What we get is really just a substitute for deep relationships that makes everything annoyingly superficial.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Intouchables (Tuesday, May 15, 2012) (49)

Toward the end of last year, I kept hearing about a French movie called The Intouchables (which, as far as I understood means "The Untouchables"... I don't understand the weird semi-translation... because of the De Plama movie? What about the two Crash movies?) that was setting all sorts of box office records in Europe. Today it is the highest-grossing film not in English of all time. This has to be a brilliant and amazing film, right?! Well, no so much.

The Intouchables, directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano (from their script), is based on a true story (a concept that always makes me gag for its worthlessness) and is filled with all sorts of post-neoliberal racism and bizarrely blind classism. I would hope that white people who go to see this movie feel really proud of themselves for witnessing the assistance of a single African immigrant, who lives in the housing projects. Clearly such magnanimity is the key to moving our world forward in a peaceful and beautiful way where all children are loved regardless of their color... just like The Help.

Philippe (Francois Cluzet) is a billionaire living in an amazing house in Paris (it seems to be on Ile St. Louis... or maybe that's just where it should be). He is a quadriplegic and has a gigantic staff of helpers and attendants who look after him at all times. One morning, he and one of his assistants are interviewing new caretakers who will wash, dress and chauffeur him around all the time. In walks Driss (Omar Sy) a tall and dark black man who is clearly not taking the interview process seriously, but simply is looking for a signature on his unemployment form (in France you have to prove that you're applying for jobs and not getting them before you can get your unemployment benefit). 

He proceeds to give incredibly rude and unprofessional answers to basic questions, and hits on Philippe's hot assistant (Audrey Fleurot). This has the opposite result than he was hoping, of course, and Philippe hires him, seeing his unpolished and direct style as a welcome change from the sycophantic treatment he gets from most people in the world. Naturally, Philippe and Driss become best friends, each one helping the other see the world in a different light and each one showing the other that friendship can be filled with real emotions and real connections. 

Also, naturally, there's lots of stuff about Driss being a hoodrat who has never heard opera music, only listens to Earth, Wind & Fire (Really? A contemporary black dude who only listens to '70s funk/disco? Not Jay-Z?) and is the world's best dancer. We are aghast that Philippe's friends react to Driss in such a callous, superficial way ("because he's black," we whisper) -- even though his behavior really is mostly  unpredictable and sometimes offensive. 

But then there's a scene when, for Philippe's birthday, everyone gets dressed in black tie for a concert and Driss looks amazing (insert house-slave stereotype here) and that aforementioned hot assistant says that he looks "just like Obama". Let's be absolutely crystal clear: Omar Sy looks NOTHING like Barack Obama, aside from the fact that both of them have skin that's not lily white. This is not played as a comment designed to make us see Philippe's world as unchangeable and eternally racist; this is a scene to show us that a black man in a suit is an object of sexual desire (again, house-slave theme) and the assistant's comment is supposed to be what we are all thinking -- that is if we were all living in 1952 Mississippi. ("They all look alike to me."l

The third act is a total structural mess, with Driss being sent away to his aunt in the projects for some bizarre and unexplainable reason, and then being brought back for equally unclear motivations. We understand that Philippe and Driss are two halves of a pair and that they complete one another like a black and white cookie (look to the cookie!). And then we all sit back in our seats an groan because it's such a hackneyed idea (when it's not being totally offensive). Meanwhile, Philippe does nothing to help Driss' family or anyone not inside the walls of his urban chateau -- because Marxism is a terrible thing and that would be punishing Philippe for working hard... or something. 

This is such a silly trifle of a film, and so offensively post-racial it's shocking anyone has said anything mildly kind about it. It should be looked at with contempt. Sure, there are some brief, sweet moments between the two guys... and Sy is a really fantastic dancer, if you can put your "magical negro dance number" glasses on the top of your head... but it's overall message, that we should all get along better -- but only on the terms of the white guy and the billionaires -- is deeply disgusting. 

Stars: 1 of 4

Elena (Thursday, May 3, 2012) (44)

Andrei Zvyagintsev's Elena is a quiet psycho-sexual drama reminiscent of films by Hitchcock, Hawks and Wilder. That's a hell of a group to compare any contemporary work to, but this is no ordinary film. The story revolves around the title character Elena (Nadezhda Markina), a woman in her late-60s who works as the caretaker/housekeeper for Sergei (Aleksei Rozin) a millionaire in Moscow and is also married to him. She lives in separate, modest quarters from him in his modernist condo flat, wakes him in the morning, makes him food and sleeps with him when the mood is right (in the middle of the day).

She's from a poor suburb where her grown son and his family still live in a housing project. They are struggling to get by and rely on money she brings them when she visits them by train several times a month. Her son is unemployed and claims he can't get a job, but she believes he's not trying hard enough. She asks Sergei for help in getting a letter of reference for her grandson to go to university, thus avoiding military service, but the old man is not interested in helping her.

He doesn't see why he should help her family. She feels like he's being too rigid and points out that Sergei takes wonderful financial care of his own daughter, a twenty-something clubgirl who has never worked a day in her life. When Sergei says that he's going to change his will to leave her and her family out in the cold, Elena realizes she's running out of time and running out of options, and that she might have to murder him before he gets to talk to his lawyer.

The film is very serene and deliberate. Elena and Sergei, both older and in no particular rush in general speak to one another respectfully and carefully. The beautiful cinematography, by Mikhail Krichman, washes the interiors in a cool blue-gray that makes everything seem peaceful (if a bit morose). This is a psycho-drama in the grand tradition of the genre, with the action taking place much more in Elena's head than on screen in physical action.

On top of this, for the score, Zvyagintsev uses a Philip Glass's 1995 Symphony No. 3, a very typical minimalist work that is slow and easy. It's an interesting choice not only for tone, but because it, like most of Glass' music, is as much about the space between notes as it is about the sounds themselves. This creates a lovely parallel between Elena's anguish and the score.

The curious relationship between Elena and Sergei is unsettling and interesting. It is clear that they are married, however they share almost no bright, outward love together. They clearly care for one another, but she really does feel more like his nurse and housekeeper than his wife or lover. It seems in this new Russia -- where a man can be a millionaire and lives in a beautifully appointed building, whose wealth comes from some unknown, possibly unethical business -- people are separated from their natural state of family and love. Both characters seem to be stretching traditional family life to its extreme in this inhuman world. As much as this post-Communist world has freed people to do and think as they wish, something has been lost as people become isolated and relationships are formal and unfeeling.

There are not a lot of moving parts to this film. It is very efficient, though never seems rushed. It is sympathetic to both Elena and Sergei, even considering their opposite goals. Near the end of the film, we see Elena's newborn grandchild laying on its back in the middle of a bed. It looks helpless and isolated in a sea of bedspread. This baby is who everyone in this film is: somewhat immobile, unable to help himself, in a desperate struggle to make the next move.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Goodbye First Love (Sunday, April 22, 2012) (42)

There's something about Mia Hansen-Love's films that just don't work and don't connect for me. Her last film, The Father of My Children, never really came together and seemed like a good movie with a bad script and an unpolished concept. It's clear that Hansen-Love is a talented director (although I can't say yet that she's more than just merely "talented"), but I would say that she's a mediocre screenwriter and that her films suffer from garbagey melodrama that connects more to banal ideas of "romance" than to any real-world in which her stories take place.

Such is the problem with her new film, Goodbye First Love. It's the story of a high school girl, Camille (played by the fetching Lola Créton), who has a deep love for her teen boyfriend, Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky). He's a few years older than she is and when he forgoes college for a shapeless trip to South America (the French love Ché!), the two lose touch. She takes this very hard and tries to kill herself (natch) and then comes out of the hospital without the lust for life she previously had.

She then goes to architecture school and begins to work for her professor, Lorenz (Magne-Havard Brekke), who she also starts to sleep with, date and move in with. He's an older Norwegian man with an ex-wife and kid in Berlin who loves Camille's sensibility and reserve. Meanwhile, she struggles with her never-ending love for Sullivan and the constant wanting what she can't have.

I guess this isn't really the kind of movie I would ever relate to. I don't go in for sentimentality much and never really understand stories like this. For me, the concept of "first loves" is trite in the deepest possible way, and something that is more forced on us by gossip magazines and "girl culture" than by anything particularly psychological or human. What the hell is so special about Sullivan for Camille? He seems like a typically nice, distant and youthful boyfriend and their connection is much more suggested (by the fact that she can't ever get over him) than shown to us. When she ends up with Lorenz (as gross and cliche as it is to fuck your professor... seriously), it's maddening that she can't just be happy with him, but longs for Sullivan.

Herein lies an interesting dilemma for me. If film viewing is really an experience of identification and alignment with certain characters, it's impossible for me to connect to this film because I'm supposed to identify with Camille, but I can't because I think she's a fastidious moron. Meanwhile, I understand that many people (most people) would totally align with her because of how they're wired emotionally.

This leads to a bigger problem about the film, buried in the script, which is that Hansen-Love really doesn't do much to link us to Camille other than giving the briefest of outlines of her character. We only see the biggest moving parts of her persona, namely that she's 17 at some point and madly in love with a boy. This shorthand functions as the only information we get about her. For many this is enough to totally understand everything she feels at all moments. For others, like me, this seems under-written and under-developed.

Hansen-Love is truly a good director and is able to show a pretty movie with a nice use of technical factors. She is, however tripped up by her reliance on middlebrow scripts that don't show her skills as well as possible. I hope she continues to grow and make better films in the future.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Day He Arrives (Saturday, April 21, 2012) (41)

Hong Sang-Soo's film The Day He Arrives fits squarely in a category of "oblique movies," films that function as much as a pure art film as it does as storytelling. There is basically a beginning and end, but the middle gets rather murky -- on purpose -- and it is in this fog, and because of this fog, that the tale comes alive and turns something banal into something wonderful.

Concentrating again on the reflexive world of "film culture," as he did with his last film Woman on the Beach, the movie focuses on the day film professor and director Sangjoon arrives in Seoul to meets up with his friend Youngho. Sangjoon first visits an ex-girlfriend, and walks down the street meeting and talking to several strangers. He meets a trio of film students who recognize him and invite him to eat a meal with them. He later meets up with Youngho and a woman who works with him. The waitress at this restaurant is flirty and they all four begin to talk. At the end of the night they leave as normal.

The next thing we see, without any explanation is the same story beginning again (or, at least beginning after Sangjoon leaves the ex's apartment). Most of the specifics about the thread are different, conversations has some similarities although people meet in different places and go in different directions, but the important structural elements (such as Sangjoon eating at a restaurant and leaving with a woman) remain intact and recognizable. We see three full cycles of the same story, each a bit different.

Of course, the first thought in any film-goer's mind is that this seems like a twist on Rashomon-type story, where the reason for the variations is because different people remember the situation differently. However it doesn't seem to be that straightforward. This isn't so much about different points of view of the same story, but different possibilities of the same very small events. It also doesn't involve multiple narrators, but just a single third-person omniscient one.

It's never clear, nor does it matter, whether each of these scenarios actually plays out in Sangjoon's life, if he imagines the same situations happening differently (maybe he ends up with the waitress at the end of the night, maybe with Yongho's colleague), or if it's just Hong riffing on a small idea -- possibly a meta work on the nature of the medium with screenwriter/filmmaker playing god at the human chessboard. There is a sense that Hong is improvising on a theme the way a Jazz saxophonist might twist and expand a standard, so you know what you're hearing, though you never heard it this way before.

Hong really gives us no clear answers about what he's looking to achieve here (unlike with the Kurosawa, where it's pretty clear he's exploring the nature of subjectivity) and this is what makes the film interesting and fun. It has a playfulness and an alacrity that raises this essay from purely theoretical and alienating to familiar and warm. We get into the game of the film, waiting for the next story rhyme, enjoying how variations from past events will come back. At one point a highway sign flashed for less than a second in the first shot of the film comes back near the end -- not creating any great meaning, but highlighting that the act of film viewing is deep and should be engaging.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Post Mortem (Friday, April 13, 2012) (38)

The final sequence in Pablo Larrain's Post Mortem is one of the most interesting, evocative and incisive images I can remember in any film in a long time. After watching the main character Mario (Alfredo Castro) deal with his uneventful and lonely life for 90 minutes, he finally cracks and starts acting out the psychological difficulty that's inside him. Out of emotional desperation he has become friends with his neighbor, a stripper and cabaret star, Nancy (Antonia Zegers). Theirs is really not an emotional friendship, nor really much of a friendship at all. They both function as some external power forcing the other to connect with something else in the world.

They both are struggling to deal with the events of the moment, namely the Pinochet coup d'etat over Allende in 1973 Chile. Mario works in the morgue and is involved in the autopsy of Allende himself, after his assassination. This act, and the coldness and passivity of his job shakes him to his core. He is rather incapable of connecting to people on an emotional level and his very gray life seems to be filled with nothing but difficulty. In one magnificent scene, Mario and Nancy sit at opposite ends of his small kitchen table and quietly begin to weep, for no particular reason, though we know it has to do with the overwhelming pain and struggle of their respective lives.

Back to the last scene of the film, through a series of events, Mario gets involved in helping Nancy's family who are leftist radicals. He hides her brother in the shed in his back yard and after finally cracking, starts to pile stuff and junk in front of the door. Tables, chairs, coffee tables, small things, big things. He's literally trying to keep his feelings inside, lest they get out and overwhelm his life.

This might seem like a bit obvious (the tightly wound man breaks down and seems to go crazy with a physical action that represents his internal turmoil), but it's performed and produced beautifully and deeply emotionally. What's more is that it's not a simple act, but a long and drawn-out one that seems to go on past the point of normal limits, past the point of our comprehension. It moves from a simple, superficial psych tick to an important symbolic action, to an extreme cry for help, unlike what you find in typical storytelling.

Meanwhile, as is typical of the New Chilean Cinema style, this scene, and the whole film, has a rigorous naturalistic, neorealist tone. Everything is washed-out gray-brown-yellow, shabby and bleak. People are more interested in simply fucking their co-worker (not Mario, but people he works with) than making any real connections. The inner turmoil every character suffers is internal and poorly expressed because they're all broken people.

Larrain does a wonderful job with this very small story and makes it much more powerful than it might seem on the page. The film runs on an internal inertia that seems contained mostly in the gaps between actions. It's not the Allende autopsy that throws Mario, per se, but the constant pushing of his workaday life and the difficulty he has making connections. There is a lot of silence in the film and that becomes very powerful. Castro's performance, in particular, really leads this film and moves it along. He always seems on the edge of a cliff, about to jump off, but terrified of making any action. Larrain uses this dual tension brilliantly to create an eerie but relateable tone.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Monsieur Lazhar (Friday, April 13, 2012) (37)

French-Canadian Philippe Falardeau's film Monsieur Lazhar was one of the nominees for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2012 Oscars. It is a celebration of everything that is wonderful about modern multiculturalism and how people are good inside if you give them the chance to show you what's in their heart. This sentiment makes me a bit sick as it's so sunny and saccharine it's almost impossible to be interesting. Even with a story that has some rather dark and challenging moments, the film really only falls into the predictable category of "movies about teachers and students who seem different but connect with love." 

Bachir Lazhar is an Algerian immigrant to Montreal who turns up at an elementary school the day after a popular teacher has hanged herself in her classroom on a school morning. As the administrators and kids come to grips with the loss of their friend and guide, he explains that he was a teacher in a similar school in his homeland and is the process of getting his asylum status in Canada. At first he's an odd fit for the school, which has a rather liberal view of educational (teachers are called by their first names, students are encouraged to sit in a circle rather than rows). He has a more traditional process, including an autocratic style and dictation from old texts involving complex, arcane language. 

As he comes to learn about the pain the students are feeling (one boy and one girl who witnessed their teacher killing herself moments before class began), Monsier Lazhar begins to relax and thrive in this environment. At the same time, it seems he wasn't entirely forthcoming about his background and his status in the country and in the school could be in doubt. 

This is a nice film, but nothing very interesting. The real tension rests on whether the kids accept him as positive force, but we've seen this movie dozens of times before and know they always do. Then there's a bit of tension based on the silly and incidental fact that the school doesn't do a thorough check of his life before hiring him... but that's not really interesting and has nothing to do with the emotional development of the story. 

This feels much more like a prescribed series of events than any story I can become particularly invested in. We know there will be tension with the students and other teachers, we know he'll come to be loved, we know there will be ongoing cultural disconnections, we know it probably can't last. At no point do we really care what happens to the moving parts, because they really only function as parts in the greater banal story. 

It's very nice that this was nominated for the Oscar, but it's clearly not as good as other foreign language films that were also (it's not even the best French-Canadian film from 2011). It has all the hallmarks of sweet movie (and I generally like any movie that begins with a grizzly hanging), but none of the oomph of something I really care about. 

Stars: 2 of 4 

The Hunter (Sunday, April 15, 2012) (39)

There's been something interesting going on in Australian cinema in recent years. A country once dominated by Brits and Peter Weir, where it seems every other Hollywood star comes from (can you think of an action movie or costume drama in the last 15 years that didn't have one Aussie in it?) has strangely produced only a small amount of fresh directing and writing talent. And yet there seems to be something bubbling down there. A handful of interesting, if not totally successful, films in the past few years have come to represent some sort of renaissance downunda.

One of the standouts from this new class is the recent film The Hunter, directed by Daniel Nettheim, adapted by Alice Addison from a novel by Julia Leigh. This is a very elegant contemporary Western set in the mysterious world of ecoterrorism, bio-pharmacology and extreme survivalism. Martin David (Willem Dafoe) is some sort of extreme-outdoorsman-for-hire who is given the mysterious task of researching the possible existence of Tasmanian tigers, long though to be extinct, by a mysterious bio-tech company. Martin is a total badass, like a Bear Grylls with a gun and no camera crew.

He gets to his Tasmanian base camp in the home of a rural single mother, depressed after the mysterious disappearance of her outdoorsman husband, and her two young kids (super charming and sweet kids... and I don't really get kids). He finds that he's totally unwelcome by the locals who are loggers and figure his work will result in them losing their work. He's also pressured by the environmental hippies who monitor the actions of the loggers. He goes into the wilderness looking for signs of tigers (which are really closer to wolves than big cats), and finds himself being stalked along the way. Back at the base camp, he improves the lives of the broken family he's living with, but the attention he brings might also be risking their safety as well.

I know very little about Tasmania, but apparently it's rugged and beautiful, looking a lot like Alaska or the woody parts of the upper Midwest. It's one of those places that looks so good on screen that you wonder whether it's beautiful cinematography (by Robert Humphreys) or just photography of a gorgeous place. Nettheim has a nice touch, using lots of helicopter shots, which can frequently be cliche, but help here to get a sense of the bigness of the spaces and the smallness of people.

Isolation and loneliness is a repeated theme throughout the film, as there is only minimal music used (mostly diegetic) and lots of silence. Dafoe has a stoic calmness, that's somewhat unsettling and also strangely kind (he seems to be a good guy in the way he deals with the family). The two kids are clearly desperate for his attention when he arrives at their house, partly because they're young and happy, but mostly because they're incredibly lonely and are looking for some sort of attention or break from their dull lives.

Perhaps the idea is that in the conflict between nature and humans, the sides are not evenly matched. As Martin seems to be the best human out there to unlock the secrets of the wilderness for a company who hopes to do something probably ugly with his findings, he is outmatched, a small being in the vastness of the outback (think of astronaut Dave Bowman floating through the silence and coldness of outer space in 2001: A Space Odyssey). But there's also a feeling that in the human world, we don't even give one another basic assistance in the form of love or kindness, which turns us into lone wolves in our daily lives. Business interests try to exploit this for financial gain, creating a conflict between those who want to connect to others and those who would rather hurt one another, between those who want to live with nature and who want to constantly battle against it.

There is a unspeakable sadness that pervades the film, eerily, heartbreakingly brought to life when Martin gets the family's turntable working and Springsteen's song "I'm On Fire". The missing dad had previously hooked speakers up into the trees, so when the music comes on, the area is surrounded by the melancholy song, reminding us of the relative silence that preceded it.

At times Nettheim get's a bit tied up in banal script elements, like his poor reception from the locals when he arrives or a overly sentimental penultimate scene. Still, he does a really interesting job otherwise with a story that doesn't really feel like a masterpiece.

The Hunter is a good solid movie, and although it's not perfect, it is a lot of fun and a clever twist on a classic Western talk of an outsider coming into a small town to shake things up.

Stars: 3 of 4

Turn Me On, Dammit! (Monday, March 26, 2012) (32)

It seems like most teen-angst-high-school-sucks movies come in two tones: one is a rather silly comedic one where adults look back on their time as teens and amplify silly traits of kids and adults; the other way is a bit darker and presents the story from the kids' point of view, resulting in kids talking, feeling and thinking like grown-ups. Jannicke Systad Jacobsen's Turn Me On, Dammit! is different from both of these styles as it seems to present the story from a teen girl's point of view, but in a frank, non-condescending way. Lead characater, Alma (Helene Bergsholm), is not biterly sarcastic like a Juno or a Mean Girl (because no girls talk or think like 30-year-old screenwriters), but is filled with self-doubt, fear and lots and lots of libido.

Set in a a tiny village in rural Norway, the story deals with a small event in Alma's life that turns into a major high school drama, as frequently happens with 15-year-olds. Alma is always incredibly horny and when she's not masturbating in her bedroom at night (loudly) she calls phone sex hot lines and masturbates on the kitchen floor (while the dog watches). One day at a party her crush, Artur (Matias Myren) pulls out his dick out of his pants in front of her and rubs it on her skirt. Not knowing how to react, she goes to the bathroom and masturbates again (of course!).

When she gets out she tells her two best friends, Sara and Ingrid (Malin Bjorhovde and Beate Stofring). Ingrid, a classic mean girl, is jealous of Alma because she's also in love with Artur (it's a really small village, so he's one of only a handful of boys) so she tells everyone that Alma said this and is lying. Immediately Alma becomes a social pariah and is desperate to regain her friends and her mid-level status... but kids are shits and irrationally mean.

There's a wonderful joy to the film that one rarely sees in movies (almost never in American fare). Alma is clearly awesome and her advanced sexuality feels natural (and deeply erotic). The film opens with a clever montage showing static shots of the village's highlights with voice-over by Alma listing what we see: mail boxes, a bus stop, a mountain, stupid sheep. This bitterness doesn't take over the story, like it does in Juno, but just gives a realistic frame for the story. Alma herself is upbeat and hopeful. Yes she's sarcastic and has an active fantasy life (sometimes shown in action, sometimes wonderfully presented in black and white stills), but she's totally normal and not smarter or more beautiful than anyone else there.

In this debut narrative feature, Jacobsen beautifully shows the world from Alma's point of view. Her emotions are frequently underlined by soundtrack cues -- it wouldn't be a melancholy though oddly optimistic Norwegian moment without a Kings of Convenience song or two. At other times we see Alma's fantasy life jump into her story momentarily confusing us (and her) as to what is real and what is a dream. It's totally fun, interesting and compassionate to Alma, who is a totally awesome but normal teenage girl with a very active imagination.

There's something so refreshing about seeing naturalism on screen that's happy and unembellished. This is a movie that does exactly that. Life goes from normal to chaos to normal, much like any one of a hundred days in a teen's life, or in anyone's life, really. Despite the fact that this setback hurts Alma deeply for a period of time, even she can see that it's a small thing in the long run.

Stars: 3 of 4

Turn Me On, Dammit! opens in New York City on March 30 and in Los Angeles on April13.

Free Men (Thursday, March 22, 2012) (31)

Free Men, co-written by Ismael Ferroukhi and Alain-Michel Blanc and directed by Ferroukhi, deals with a hidden-in-recent-history moment of World War II-era Paris when North African Muslims helped and fought along with the Resistance. Most interestingly, the story is presented in a very human and naturalistic style -- similar to preWWII-era French cinema (think something like Renoir's The Crime of M. Lange or Carné's Port of Shadows).

As the film opens, Paris has already fallen to the Nazis and we see the familiar tapestry of policemen, with SS and Vichy officers elbowing to get power. In a mosque in Paris, the imam, Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit (Michel Lonsdale), has a mini empire where he leads his faithful, but also protects several Jews, many of whom also come from Algeria and Morocco. Into this garden comes Younes (the fabulous Tahar Rahim), a petty criminal and black marketeer who is looking to get away from the heat of police after a few sloppy jobs. He falls in love with the people in this corner of Paris, particularly a singer of Arabic ballads (who happens to be Jewish) and a woman, Leila (Lubna Azabal), who happens to be a communist agitator.

This is not a fancy movie with elaborate formal qualities or complicated plot twists. It is a nice and straightforward film about a moment in time, where the history of Nazis and Vichy bureaucrats, Germans and French, Muslims and Jews, Arabs and Whites, French and North Africans came into direct contact. It has the loving, humanist tenor of a Renoir work, deeply believing in the goodness of people to fix bad situations through working together. This is a clever decision. It's not a flashy action flick, which it could have been, but is a more gentle, elegant story.

Rahim, who formally lead A Prophet, Audiard's masterpiece from 2010, is fantastic here again. He's confident without being arrogant, young but not immature. He's such a joy to see on screen, brightening up any shot with his movie-star magnetism. Lonsdale is, of course, great -- just as he's been for the past 40-some years. Azabel, who has a few more pictures coming up soon, is intelligent and beautiful -- an interesting Arab answer to Betty Bacall or Ingrid Bergman (though she's more like Bacall in To Have and Have Not here than Bergman in Casablanca).

I'm surprised we're not taught more about the role of North Africans in the Resistance movement in history class. This film is illuminating, but also warm and well made.

Stars: 3 of 4

Footnote (Friday, March 9, 2012) (25)

Joseph Cedar's Footnote was Israel's entry into the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race this year - and it is a very good film, well worth watching. It has a very dark and cerebral tone that generally has the comic feeling of Jonze's Being John Malkovich -- a bit of a latter-day screw-ball with lots of bleakness.

Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) and Eliezer (Shlomo Bar-Aba) Shkolnik, are two leading Talmudic professors in Jerusalem. Father, Eliezer, a broken man filled with almost no love left inside, has spent his entire life researching variations in versions of the Talmud, only to blocked by his main academic rival. His greatest accomplishment is being referenced in a footnote by his mentor. Uriel, his son, a joyful husband and father himself, has become a leading expert on Talmudic traditions, softer subject matter that the father resents. He seems to be a pushover in life and in his family, but a very good man.

One day Eliezer is surprised to get a phone call that he won the most prestigious national prize for scientific research, after he tried for dozens of years, but always came up blank. He seems like a changed man all of a sudden, finding some joy in his accomplishment. The next day, however, Uriel is called to the prize committee's office where they tell him that he was supposed to win rather than his father and that his father got the phone call by mistake (they're both Professor Shkolnik, after all). He now has to figure out a way of convincing the committee to give his father the prize despite internal academic political issues.

The film explores the intersections of truth and fiction, hard scientific research and fluffy social scientific observation. Both men would argue their work is hard research, but Cedar certainly suggests that there's some chest puffing involved in all academic work. There is also a very glib idea that all academic work really doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the real world -- that internal politics of any organization have as much to do with what gets out and its impact as the significance of the work has.

Cedar uses a very sarcastic style throughout, both in his script and in the formal presentation. When Uriel visits the committee in their offices to discuss the problem, there are seven people (he makes eight) in a tiny closet of a room. Whenever anyone wants to get in or leave, they have to rearrange the chairs in a funny bit of physical comedy. Cedar cleverly mixes wonderfully rich long takes (the first shot lasts for about 8 minutes) with elegant dutch angles and interesting lenses. At times there's a jokey score, at other times there is pure silence, as different characters struggle with internal hopes and fears.

There are also, sadly a handful of untied up elements that seem to lead nowhere, but also don't really act as MacGuffins (the big prize itself is a true MacGuffin). There's a bizarre suggestion that Eliezer has a former girlfriend who comes back (actually it's really not clear who this woman is... I'm just guessing that she's an ex) and Uriel struggles with his ne'er-do-well son who is happy to sit and watch TV rather than studying. These things really should have been cleaned up and cut out -- the film would have been a lot tighter without them.

This is a very funny and smart movie and a lot of fun to watch, with great acting throughout (because everyone really plays it straight and not over-the-top, which it really is). I'm happy it doesn't dwell on the rather tired trope of father-son relationships and deals more with the means of academia and the reality of "Truth" and acknowledgment as these are much more interesting ideas with more room for fresh comedy.

Stars: 3 of 4

Blackthorn (2011) (Wednesday, March 8, 2012) (159)

Mateo Gil's film Blackthorn is an interesting re-imagining of the end of the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid story. In it, Butch and Sundance don't die in the shootout in Bolivia depicted at the end of the George Roy Hill film, but survive and go off in other directions. We first meet James Blackthorn (Sam Shepard), an American horse rancher in the Bolivian wilderness. He is the man formerly known as Butch, now twenty-some years removed from his glory days. He has recently gotten word that Etta's son (by him or by Sundance... raindrops falling on my head and all...) is grown and living in San Francisco and decides to sell everything and move back to America to see him.

What transpires next is a classic Western story with a slightly more Bolivian twist. Blackthorn gets involved with a Spanish engineer who is working for a mining company that has gone under, but is still able to pay the gringo for saving his life. All things are not as they seem, as Blackthorn's own persona suggests, and we see in flashbacks the ultimate fates of Etta and Sundance, how Butch got to where he is today as well as clues to this engineer's story.

Screenwriter Miguel Barros does a clever job with the story here weaving together incidents from Butch's past to show why he does certain things in the present. Still, there is a bit too many flashbacks, leaving this film almost as much of a coda to the first film than a story in and of itself (the way The Color of Money has a story independent of The Hustler, for instance).

There are not enough words to describe how beautiful the cinematography by Juan Ruiz Anchia is and how it makes the natural world seem magical and supernatural. Yes, it's always easier to make gorgeous settings look amazing on film, but Anchia's use of lush colors and contrasting areas of light and dark, horizons and mountains, is still absolutely breathtaking. For long periods of the film Blackthorn and the engineer trek across a dessert salt flat, which transforms into an otherworldly snowy plane with an ominous blue-gray sky overhead. This all looks fabulous.

This is a good film, but I certainly wanted to like it more as there seems to be something missing spiritually or emotionally from it. Blackthorn seems like a bit too much of a straw man who is only background and past with almost nothing going on in the present. This generally works, because the back-story is so compelling and familiar, but it's not the most effective form of storytelling.

Sam Shepard is one of the most underrated actors ever, I feel (perhaps because of his achievements as a playwright), and he's wonderful here... I just feel like he does all he can with the rather weak role and still leaves us wanting more.

If nothing else, this film should be watched and enjoyed for the amazing photography; it's a shame the story can't be as good.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

17 Girls (Saturday, March 3, 2012) (22)

The first think to know about Delphine and Muriel Coulin's film 17 Girls is that it's technically really great. Muriel worked for a time as an assistant camera tech on Kieslowski's French films and she knows how to shoot stuff and make it look really nice. The second thing to know about the film is that the lead actress, Louise Grinberg (OMG -- possibly a Jew?!!?), is one of the most gorgeous women ever on on the planet. The third thing to know about the film is that those first two things don't really matter, because it's such a silly story that it comes off as over-the-top and ridiculous, making it hard to relate to and a bit forgettable.

The film follows a clique of five girls who, when their leader, Camille (Grinberg), gets knocked up and then another girl seems to get knocked up, all decided they should all get pregnant and live in some later-day hippie commune, or something (apparently with no daddies around). Considering this group is so cool, other girls in the school also follow their lead and get pregnant.... until there are 17 of them.

Because it's French there is a commentary on post-War Modernist culture and the end of the industrial dream in former industrial coastal France (the film takes place in Lorient in Brittany). There's a lot of discussions with teachers and parents about how political an action this is (apparently it is loosely based on a story like this that happened in Glauchester, Mass a few years ago). The girls also discuss these things, though they seem to be grasping at straws more than any significant ontological and philosophical discussion.

There is a really nice mix of static and moving shots throughout the film. The last shot is particularly nostalgic and evocative as it tracks down a beach from the inland side of the dunes shooting people on the sand slightly out of focus. The story, however, is a rather silly and ties up in a cheap way.

The script is really the weakest part of the film -- which is saying a lot considering most of the girls are played by non-actors from the region. I think there's a nugget of a good idea here, but it doesn't develop in an interesting way. Either the third act should have been re-written or the whole thing should have been an existentialist short with an elliptical ending. What we get looks nice, but doesn't really feel like much.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

This is Not a Film (Friday, March 2, 2012) (21)

In December 2010, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, one of the leaders of the Iranian New Wave, was sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on making films, writing screenplays or doing interviews. He was accused of colluding with others to make propaganda detrimental to the Iranian regime after being arrested at the grave of Neda Agha-Soltan, the woman who became famous for being killed on camera during the 2009 Green Revolution.

In 2011, locked in his apartment awaiting a decision from the appeals court, Panahi, along with friend and documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, shot a near-documentary, near-diary piece about a day in his life. The clever title, This is Not a Film, refers to his court-ordered ban on making films, but also raises a semantic dilemma about what exactly this is that we are watching. It's not really a film in a traditional sense that there is a particular plot of story that is being worked through; it is not a documentary about anything in particular, because Panahi's actions on this day are rather banal and not particularly intersting (he could leave his house, he's not in jail yet; he is making a movie of some form).

At first Panahi reads the script that would have been his next film, were he allowed to make it. Much like the neorealist content of his other works, this one deals with a woman in college. He puts tape on the floor of his massive and seemingly rich apartment to delineate her bedroom and rearranges the furniture to suggest the setting. As he begins to read from the text (he jokes that there was no ban on reading a script, so he's not violating the ruling), he stops to talk about the art of directing and the small details of working with non-actors, as he does in most of his films. He pulls out DVDs of his past films to show what he means. He begins to break down, as he realizes he cannot do this again for the foreseeable future.

This non-film proceeds and gets into a meta-discussion between Panahi and Mirtahmasb about the nature of documentaries and representation. It leaves us wondering how much of this is scripted and how much is natural. It seems totally natural, though Panahi's wife and daughter are curiously absent for the 12 or so hours the cameras are rolling (apparently if they were home they would have to wear a chador to obey the law, however women in Iran do not wear chadors in their homes; as a way around this obvious violation of law or naturalness, Panahi sends his family out of the house for the day).

This is a very nice, very clever film that not only raises post-modern issues of representation and perceived reality, but also functions as a sly attack on the monstrosity of the Iranian regime. Smuggled out of the country on a USB drive, it's amazing to me that this wouldn't be a violation of Panahi's sentence -- although it might follow the letter of the ruling, it seems to violate it at every turn and stick a thumb in the eye of the authority.

As interesting as the film is, it does lose some steam by the end, with the last 15 minutes a return to every-day life. I'm sure this is just a view into the mundaneness of life, though it feels like it's unrelated to the rest of the film and doesn't totally have any point (we see Panahi talking to the brother of the super of his building as he takes out the garbage). As much as I like the philosophical discussions that proceed this, I find this curiously boring, waiting for some greater connection to something of significance.

This is definitely a good film and possibly an important one, but it feels more like collection of scattered thoughts more than an effective essay of any sort. It is a handful of video journal entries, almost all of which are fascinating, but don't totally hold together well, as stream of consciousness frequently is wont to do. I like how this fits into the sharp naturalness of Panahi's previous work, and I think in the long run it will act as an important milestone, it just feels a bit less cohesive than it should.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Boy (Friday, March 2, 2012) (20)

Boy is a film about a boy named Boy (James Rolleston). He lives in a Maori village in 1984 and says his biggest interest and biggest hero is Michael Jackson. He's the oldest of four brothers and sisters, his father is in jail and his mother died in childbirth several years before.

Boy has a rich and wonderful imagination, somewhat reminiscent of Napoleon Dynamite (ugh), which is to say fantastical and exuberant, though a bit crappy and taped-together. Rather than believing his father is in jail, he has several other secret-agent, super-warrior-type ideas of where he is.

One day his father, Alamein (writer-director Taika Waititi) comes back to the home and picks up his light and moronic criminal activity that got him put in jail in the first place. Of course Boy is thrilled by his return and immediately his dad becomes his biggest hero (he imagines him in several Michael Jackson music videos). But his dad can't be trusted to do anything, let alone manage four kids. As Boy's hopes grow for the life they're embarking on, Alamein falters and everything seems to fall apart.

Formally this is a really fun and wonderful film. The magical realism of Boy's imagination is absolutely adorable and exciting to witness - and Waititi does an amazing job of blending different elements together. There are great small cuts to small and silly side things related to what Boy says, frequently they're animated in a naive, childish style on lined school paper. There are hilarious sequences with Boy imagining his father as Michael Jackson in the Billie Jean or Beat It videos.

This is also a rather small movie that works well and doesn't make anything too cute, which is always a risk with a film about kids. Rolleston does a great job and Waititi doesn't dwell too much on him being in peril or other cheap tricks used by lazy directors around children.

Cuteness can sometimes be cloying for some, of course. It has the bizarreness and gonzoness of The Flight of the Conchords, but a bit more soul than that. It's not a straight comedy, as there are more important family stuff in it, but it's also not a tear-jerking story of a dad trying to clean up his act for his kids. It's a nice, happy medium and works well.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Forgiveness of Blood (Saturday, February 25, 2012) (19)

American filmmaker Joshua Marston really likes making movies not set in America. His last and most major film to this point was Maria Full of Grace from 2004, about a girl who becomes a drug mule to get cocaine from Columbia into the U.S. In his new film, The Forgiveness of Blood, Marston looks East at Albania and the curious tradition of family blood feuds there.

Nik and Rudina are two teenagers living in a rural part of Albania. When their father and uncle get in a fight with a neighbor and accidentally kill him, their lives change dramatically. In Albania, there are hard and fast rules concerning blood feuds. All men of age (or near it) are legitimate targets for retribution attacks, which means they must not leave their houses in order to stay safe. The problem is that the family who is feuding with them bends the rules of the tradition, so they intimidate and threaten Rudina, who should be off-limits as a girl, and Nik's younger brother, who should be too young to be involved.

With their father goes into hiding in the countryside to avoid getting hurt or put in jail, Rudina has to pick up the slack he leaves, stepping away from school to run his daily bread cart route. Nik, also not able to be in school, is a typical 17-year-old, interested in video games, his friends and girls, although those things become less interesting when he's trapped in his house for weeks on end.

This is a very interesting film about a subject that I didn't know much about going in. I particularly like the frankness of the situations and how the tradition of the feud is not judged, despite our Western ideas of it's madness. There is something particularly compelling and upsetting about the film being set in such a remote and seemingly poor location, where the family has a horse and cart as their main transportation, but where the kids play video games, record videos on their phones and post stuff on Facebook. It's an unexpected and beautiful clash of cultures that is happening in Albania, where shedding "less civilized" traditions of blood feuds is necessary and difficult as the digital world races in the door.

As with Maria Full of Grace, Marston has an elegant, straightforward style, very sympathetic to the young people who are caught in situations outside of their control. There is an unsentimental view of the impossible dilemma that Nik and Rudina find themselves in, a mere microcosm of the greater problem such blood feuds could cause the country going forward.

I should note also that despite the fact that Marston has no particular connection to Albania, he spent time there before co-writing the script and shooting the film. The Albanian Academy of Film actually submitted this film to the Oscars for consideration for a Best Foreign Language Film nomination, but there were some political objections raised about Marston's Americanness and it was rejected. This is still a very good film and it's a shame the Oscars couldn't have kept it in the running.

Stars: 3 of 4

Attenberg (Friday, February 24, 2012) (18)

When watching Athina Rachel Tsangari's film Attenberg, it is important to keep in mind that the writer-director got a masters in Performance Studies. Her film is as much a study of motion, dance and performance as it is a narrative. Considering this fact is also central in understanding that this is not a typical film with a standard "A to B" structure, nor is it an "easy" movie where you walk out feeling happy that you just saw some nice storytelling.

It is a challenging and a strangely cold film, though a totally beautiful one. It is one of the most interesting movies I've seen in a long time. It feels very much like Giorgos Lanthimos' brilliant 2010 film Dogtooth (for which Tsangari was an Associate Producer), though much more human and relatable.

The film centers on Marina (Ariane Labed), a 23-year-old woman who takes care of her father Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis) in the last stages of cancer treatment. They live in a small mining town on the water that Spyros designed at some point in the past 30 years, now seeming to have nearly no inhabitants in it. It's a typical Modernist village, with rectilinear streets and buildings, awkward public spaces and difficult, cold interiors.

When she's not taking her father to the hospital for his tests, Marina spends much of her time driving visiting scientists around for the local mining firm. As the story goes on, her main rider is an engineer (Lanthimos... yes, the same guy who directed Dogtooth) who she finds theoretically attractive, despite the fact that she's generally not interested in sex and has no experience with it.

One of her main interests is hanging out with her best friend Bella (Evangelia Randou). The two almost exclusively talk about sex; Bella is a normal 23-year-old who likes sex, has a boyfriend and likes talking about it and she's rather obsessed with teaching Marina all she knows. Marina, meanwhile, seems reticent about her sexuality or any erotic emotions.

All of this is rather simple and straightforward and makes up most of the plot ... which is to say very little happens in this story. What keeps it interesting the whole time, though, is that Tsangari formally tells a separate story, different from the general narrative. The film is a master class in the differences and effects of static and moving camera work. Almost all of the standard narrative elements are shot with static shots. Tsangari has a keen eye for composition and these shots are almost all interesting, contrasting deep shots with shallow ones and characters at different points in space .

In the middle of all these static story-telling scenes, Tsangari intercuts sequences of uncanny dance and movement performed by Marina and Bella. At first glance these seem a bit out of place and disconnected, and they all use moving cameras. Why this stark change in style all of a sudden? Well, these near-nondiegetic moments seem to function as some sort of dream-space, or at least non-chronological pieces of the story. Both characters intently look at the camera as they do these actions, reminding us that we are watching two performers, who might be the characters we know them as, but might just be two random people dancing. Certainly these dynamic shots are more liberating than the rest of the static ones.

There's a wonderful long dolly shot following Marina pushing Spyros down a long hall in the hospital. Here is where the dream world crosses over for a moment with the earthly, Modernist world. In fact, the whole film functions as a long and effective criticism of Modernist ideals. For one thing, Spyros himself criticizes his own design, saying he built this unnatural space on the top of sheep meadows. He gets into the concept that there was not a natural evolution in this town (or perhaps in Greece in general) from one era to another (from agriculture to industry), but that the Modernist era came along and sat on history, forcing its emotionless will on everything. He's ashamed of his greatest accomplishment as he gets ready to face the unknown. (There's an interesting analysis of the current Greek debt crisis here, more incisive than many news reports.)

This leads Marina's other main hobby, which is watching the nature films of Sir David Attenborough. Both Spyros and Marina (when he's at home and not in the hospital) love to watch the scientist talk about monkeys and other jungle creatures and sometimes re-enact their strange movements and screams. She seems to have a connection with natural, evolutionary things more than she does with other people. She is the product of Modernism, devoid of deep sentiment and disconnected from other things. The title of the film, at this point, becomes a Modernist respelling of Attenborough's name.

Tsangari has all the actors speaking their lines in particularly monotone, dispassionate style, possibly inspired by Richard Maxwell or other Post-Modern theater or performance creators. Again, this underlines the strangeness and non-humanness of the setting and the people in the film. All of the actors are wonderful, but particularly Labed and Mourikis, who seem to have a fun time as they do mundane things (and also seem to interact in a wonderful and intimate way that fathers and daughters who love one another really do).

This is a deeply interesting and thematically difficult film. Whereas Lanthimos' Dogtooth was a bit of joke, playing mostly with semiotics in a bizarro non-place, Attenberg seems to take the argument one step farther. Tsangari shows how the Modernist legacy in every-day life has magnified certain behaviors and alienated us from our natural states of being. She raises simple bathos to near holy, fetishistic levels, mixing weirdness and beauty in connected (and disconnected) moments. This is what modernity is. She does this all in a gorgeous and elegant way with techniques far beyond her years.

Stars: 4 of 4

Miss Bala (Friday, February 24, 2012) (17)

The title to the Mexican drug gangster film Miss Bala is rather clever. "Bala," of course, means "bullet," and, furthermore, the main character in the film is a contestant in the Miss Baja beauty pageant. This near-homonym is the core of the story, although it might also be as interesting as the film itself.

Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman) and her best friend enter themselves in the Miss Baja California competition, rather on a lark. The night before the event, the friend, who is dating a drug dealer, takes her to a nightclub just as the Federales get there to arrest everyone. Laura gets away, but her friend does not. As a witness to the events, and knowing what she knows about the identities of the leaders of the gang, she becomes an important witness in an elaborate game of back-and-forth between the police and the cartel. The drug lord insists that she remain in the pageant as a way of keeping an eye on her and not drawing too much attention to them, but it also puts her in a gray position of appearing to work with them... which is the wrong place to be when the cops are rounding up all the associates of the gang.

This is a fun movie, but not really particularly emotional or gripping. As much as Sigman is gorgeous, I never really found it easy to connect to her, either because of her acting or the script. She's mostly a weak pawn through the film, which is particularly frustrating because she seems to be a smart cookie. She's so unaware of her situation in the greater game that the only makes one bold move through the whole event.

Still, it's an entertaining story and has a nice gritty look. It was only a matter of time before the ever-increasing Mexican drug war would hit the big screen, and I'm happy enough with this. Still, I hope that the next effort would look more at the corruption on both sides of the battlefield and how the cops and the system are dirty as the cartels (in fairness, we get a certain amount of that here, but it's a bit secondary to the action and the gunfights).

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Woman with the Five Elephants (2011) (Thursday, February 23, 2012) (155)

The so-called "five elephants" in the title of the German documentary The Woman with the Five Elephants are the five major novels by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the eponymous woman is Svetlana Geier, one of the most important translators of Russian literature into German who has spent the past 25 years working on those paper pachyderms.

This documentary starts out as a profile of Geier showing her method for translation, involving two rounds, one where she dictates to a lady who types (on a typewriter) what she says, and a second where she rereads what she put down with another linguistic and literary scholar. We see that she is a grandmother in Freiburg with a big family, she works for several hours a day and also takes care of cooking family meals for celebrations.

At some point one of her sons gets injured in an accident and she stops her translation work to take care of him, cooking for him and visiting him in the hospital. In this period she is asked by her alma mater in Kiev, Ukraine to visit and speak to students about her methods and her work. She sets off on a train trip, with one of her granddaughters, back to her hometown that she left during the war.

We then see her back story. In the Ukraine, she was a star German student and when the Nazis took control of Kiev, she got a few lucky breaks thanks to some of the officers who lived with her mother and her. At some point she was offered a scholarship to study at the University of Freiburg, where she moved with her mother before the end of the war.

There is an interesting passage where Geier reflects on her own luck and on "freedom" as described and written about by Dostoyevsky. Although she doesn't say it, it is clear she is thinking about how her own personal success and life was a result of Nazis, the archetypal group who would deny other such freedom, being kind to her.

This is a nice movie, although I feel like it's various threads don't totally connect (outside of this one sequence). I feel like there are really two stories here, one about the world's greatest Russian-to-German translator and another one about a young Ukrainian woman who got lucky early in life thanks to the Nazis. Perhaps this is very contemporary and young of me to feel, but it all doesn't really matter that much to me.

She's a wonderful woman, a loving grandmother, and has an intricate past but not all that interesting as a human. This is another case where I feel a 40-minute short would have been more compelling, showing one part of her story or another.

Stars: 2.5 of 4