Everyone Else / Alle Anderen (Maren Ade, 2009, Germany)

Alle Anderen is about a youngish German couple on vacation in Sardinia. He's an architect just starting out. His backside is strong but his hair is beginning to thin. She's a publicist for a band nobody has ever heard of. The relationship is one of those where the partners are attached to each other despite being fundamentally incompatible. If you've ever been in a relationship like this you know that although there is a small chance of making this sort of relationship work, the pair must necessarily act out all kinds of drama that stems from the uncertainty produced by such an unfortuitous pairing. This movie definitely knows what it's talking about and that's part of why it's hard to watch. The way the characters behave dysfunctionally even when they must know they're not making things better feels disarmingly authentic. I guess what I felt was lacking in this movie was anything to pull you in other than the familiarity of the dysfunction. I'm not sure the film is beautiful enough to hold its cruelty, although I find it growing on me as it has time to settle. C+

Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont, 2009, France)

Shortly after our story begins, our protagonist, a novice at a convent, is dismissed for going overboard with the abstinence and mortification. Her story is interwoven with the story of a bricklayer and petty criminal but I'm not entirely sure I know why. The mother superior says to go put herself to use in the world and she goes back to live with her wealthy parents in their majestic Ile Saint-Louis residence. She hooks up with some Arab guys at a cafe one day and goes with them to this MAJESTIC concert on the quay; it looks like punk but it's all accordion with itself. She ends up being friends with one of the boys, who has the hots for her, but she tells him she's with Jesus and that while she can ride around on stolen scooters with him and her dog, she's not going to put out for anyone but Jesus. She meets the kid's brother, who leads religious meetings upstairs from a shawarma place. There's all this religious crap that follows, including them suddenly being in the middle of a war zone in the middle east and then back in Paris seemingly up to no good. I didn't really buy it. I didn't buy the ending. I thought it was okay if you read it as a criticism of religious fervor that might indicate the thief has more to do with the main man in their fairy tale religion than anybody else. Or not. The music is lovely. The images are lovely. I liked the actors. I found the story a little cheap though. C

The Milk of Sorrow / La teta asustada (Claudia Llosa, 2009, Peru)

What a curious movie. It's hard for me to watch it without being conscious of the foreign film Oscar race. I've seen three of the other nominees and several of the other submitted films and I'm not sure this would have made my list of nominees. It's hard to say though because I feel like I'm still digesting this movie and want to see it again. I certainly loved the way the movie opens. The singing and the deathbed with the mountains in the window and all that are kind of thrilling. The story was touching. I appreciated the restraint. I don't know how I feel about this movie. I liked the music and the framing and the cinematography quite a bit. The mother was phenomenal in her one scene. The protagonist, Fausta, is mysterious and compelling. I sort of felt like there were things going on that I didn't understand culturally, such as the dynamic with the protagonist's boss. There's this great scene though where Fausta's going to work for the rich pianist for the first time and they walk into her yard through a sort of garage door type thing and that scene is an extremely effective evocation of class dynamics. It's past my bedtime. I don't know what I think about this movie yet so I'm going to give it a B+ for now. I think there is probably more depth and truth to this movie than in three or four of the other nominees but I guess I still would have voted for A Prophet just because of how intensely cinematic yet graceful it was. Of course, there's grace here as well. I just don't know. I'm rambling now. Bedtime!

Revanche (Götz Spielmann, 2008, Austria)

I've now seen four of last year's five nominees for Best Foreign Film. The one I've yet to see is Departures, the winner of the group. So far my favorite is probably The Baader Meinhof Komplex. Last night I watched the Austrian nominee Revanche. I haven't seen any of the director's films. I mean, I started watching Antares one day while I was killing time but then I had to go and I never got around to finishing the movie, although I was enjoying it. In any event, I watched this one last night. It starts of in a Viennese brothel called Cinderella. Our heroine is a Ukrainian employee of this establishment, working off a debt of $60,000. Her boyfriend, the bouncer, wants a similar amount of money so he can partner with a friend in opening a bar. The bouncer ends up being the protagonist, more or less. We find out that he's an ex-con with an ageing grandfather who lives out in the country. He decides to rob a bank to make their dreams come true and the girlfriend, Tamara, reluctantly finally agrees to support him on this if she can ride along in the car. He robs the bank. The cop husband of his grandfather's neighbor gets mixed up with them and inadvertently shoots Tamara through the rearview window. This is pretty much the setup for the revenge which I had read was coming but by this point I had completely forgotten about because I was so absorbed in the story of them escaping from the gangster pimps. I don't know what to make of this movie. My main thought is that it's beautifully shot. There were many striking shots in the film that had me "Wow"-ing. I don't know if this movie says much about revenge. Maybe it's just about grief? I mean, there is some revenge in the movie but I feel like it's mixed heavily with understanding. I don't know, I have a headache today. B

February Update #3: Trucker/Princess & the Frog and the Animated Feature Oscar/Miracle Fish/Amreeka/Moonfleet/The Cove/Dirty Filthy Love

It's been winter doldrum season so I've sort of been slacking on this thing.
It's been a pretty uneven month, certainly last month was more fulfilling cinematically but I suppose I've filled in some gaps.

Trucker showed up on some end of the year lists and it caught my eye at the video store a while back and I finally got around to watching it a few days ago. Michelle Monaghan is a woman who had been married to Benjamin Bratt, seemingly a great guy, and abandoned him and her child. She works as a semi truck driver now and seems happy with her life of driving, drinking, and no strings sexual encounters. She has what seems like an ill-advised friendship with a married neighbor and after depositing him on his porch she stumbles home to find her ex-husband's wife waiting for her with the discarded son. It seems daddy is in the hospital with cancer and his wife's mother just died so she needs to go away for a few weeks and the mother is reluctantly stuck with her son who is naturally resentful. I guess you can imagine what comes next. The film is likeable. The mother's flight from the definitions the world has imposed upon her is understandable and the characters come across as authentic and compelling for the most part. There's an act of violence toward the end and I'm not really sure it worked for me. I love that it's about working class people, more or less, but it never really soars like Frozen River, as I hoped it might. B/B-

I finally watched The Princess and the Frog so now I've seen all the Oscar nominated animated feature films this year. I feel like this one is probably the weakest even though I think I rated all of them three out of five stars on Netflix, except The Secret of Kells, which I rated four stars. It feels like a Disney movie in sleepwalk mode. It's just a regurgitation onto a standard template with standardly unimpressive music. That said, it's kind of engaging in a slight way. It has the sort of charm I might expect from a well-done direct-to-DVD children's movie. I've never seen All Dogs Got to Heaven 2 but it felt like a sequel to All Dogs Go to Heaven somehow. Maybe the music and the attitude. I feel like it makes sense that their first black princess would find herself in the middle of a sort of bland undertaking and, culturally, it's probably for the best. I'm just glad there wasn't a single rap in the whole movie because that would have been really gross. I liked the touch of bayou flavor in the music and the attempts at local color but it was kind of insipidified during Disneyfication, I think. C

On the subject of the Animated Feature Oscar, I'm not sure if I have a horse in the race. It'll probably go to Up, which I didn't care for all that much, but I'd probably have voted for The Secret of Kells. My second choice would probably be The Fantastic Mr. Fox. I haven't seen Mary and Max and the word I've heard on it has been very splintered but I kind of expected that to get nominated.

Miracle Fish is an Oscar nominated live action short film from what seems to be a much hyped Australian production company. It's about an eight year old boy who gets picked on at school because it's his birthday and all his mom gave him was this lame fortune telling fish thing that looks like it cost one to two dollars. It looks like you can currently buy 12 for five dollars on their website. In any event the rest of the class goes on some field trip or something and he sneaks into this sick room in the nurse's office and wanders out to find an empty school and eventually a gruesome surprise that is neither believable nor interesting. There was something I liked about it but it was generally dull and maudlin and insipid. C-

Amreeka is about a divorced Palestinian woman in the West Bank who works in a bank and lives with her mother and her teenage son. She and her son have to cross through this checkpoint every day and that's fairly miserable and increasingly frightening. They get a permit to emigrate to the USA she had applied for a long time ago and the son convinces her they should go because there is no future for him in Palestine. Things naturally don't go smoothly when they arrive in America but there's none of that forced Lars-von-Trier-esque torture that you might expect from this sort of thing. The kid has troubles at school; they and the cousins they move in with must cope with increasing racism; the mother can find only the most menial of jobs despite her education and her experience. It's a really lovely movie though and it's more bouyant than it sounds. There's something so real and beautiful and human and significant about it. It was mostly all the things I look for in a film. If I had seen it sooner it would likely made my top ten list or at least the honorable mentions. A

Moonfleet is a 1955 Fritz Lang film based on a popular English children's adventure novel from 1898. Similar to Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn it begins with an innocent youth arriving in a sinister English coastal city that seems to make a lot of money off various forms of piracy. The youth naturally finds himself mixed up in the den of thieves and in deep trouble from all sides. I sought it out because it's listed in John Kobal's methodology-challenged book of the Top 100 films of all time but I really don't think it belongs there. It's a decent film but it's not likely that it would even make my top 10 Fritz Lang movies, let alone top 100 of ever. Stewart Granger is kind of dreamy though, Joan Greenwood is appealing as George Sanders's sassy wife, and Viveca Lindfors is kind of electric in her brief, mildly lurid performance as Stewart Granger's gypsy-esque mistress but the story didn't really do it for me. C

I finally got around to watching the Oscar-nominated documentary The Cove last night. The trouble with so many of these well-intentioned things is that they tend to overstep in their stridence. I think this movie escapes that pitfall though and it comes across as pretty veracious throughout. I think that's why it's so effective. It feels like the filmmakers are saying, "We want to level with you hear and we aren't trying to manipulate you except explicitly by showing you this video of a dolphin slaughter and letting you make up your mind." I like that the video is presented with only the sounds of the dolphins and that although the film is set up like a suspense movie it doesn't try to manipulate you with music and they never resort to the sort of hysterics that tend to alienate people from doing the right thing. It was a good and worthy use of time and resources. A

Lastly, the final film I watched in February of 2010: Dirty Filthy Love. It's a 2004 made for British television movie about a man (Michael Sheen) whose latent OCD and comorbid conditions sort of explode when his marriage disintegrates and he loses his job. He meets a plucky nut played by the fabulous Shirley Henderson, whom I've loved ever since I saw her in that Masterpiece Theater presentation of The Way We Live Now (2001). The nut recognizes his OCD and tells him to come to her support group and he does and it's well and then he has a breakdown when his wife gives him a false hope and then moves on. The movie's kind of out there--my boyfriend wasn't really paying attention to the movie and kept remarking that the movie I was watching was really weird--but it's really kind of good. It seemed like a generally honest depiction of a constellation of mental disorders and the acting was pretty good. If only we subsidized the film industry in the United States... It's kind of sad that our nominees for best picture are very often weaker than the average European made-for-TV movie... A-/B+

35 Shots of Rum / Comedians of Comedy / In the Loop / The White Ribbon / Matador

I went to see 35 Shots of Rum the other night. I'd like to watch it again and I'd like to watch more of her films. I came pretty close to squealing a big gay squeal when Ingrid Caven's name came on the screen. She was fabulous in it but the sudden trip to Germany was one of those dramatic sections of the movie that didn't completely make sense to me. I feel ambivalent about the film. I liked the way the movie seemed to be alive. I mean, it had this magical quality to it. My feelings haven't come to rest on this movie. I don't know if I'll have a chance to see it again while it's still playing here at the Music Box though. A-

Also, in a mood to lighten up a little, I watched The Comedians of Comedy: The Movie on Netflix.com. It was all right but kind of dull. It was meandering and could have done with longer, more cohesive stand-up sets. They mentioned Sarah Silverman at the beginning and I couldn't help thinking how much better this would have been with her in it. I liked the lady with the voices. I liked some of the political humor, even though it was a lot of cheaps shots for the benefit of the choir. C-

I actually thought that In the Loop was pretty great. It was really funny but more than that it also came across as so brutally accurate. I know some people thought it was kind of blah and all I could think about that is that maybe they didn't know very much about the run-up to the Iraq war. For someone like me who started off as an NPR-fanboy before graduating to C-Span and ultimately shutting it all off to preserve my sanity, it was really great. Not only was this satire therapeutic, it was also pretty great because it seemed so honest and in this mendacious age a little bit of honesty feels like a sudden burst of oxygen to a slowly asphyxiating man. A

Then yesterday we went to see Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. My first thought was that as a student of German it was beautiful to watch because of the language. It's crisp and somewhat poetic. I kept thinking it'd be a great film to show German students because most of the speech in the film is pretty much standard German the way you'd learn it in school. Based on the trailer and my past experience with the director I was expecting something less controlled. More dramatic, more deranged, more painful to watch. It almost seemed light and airy compared to my expectations. I think what I wrote on Facebook after seeing it was that it was like a Herzog movie where the audience and the characters could breathe. It's beautifully shot. Lovely and atmospheric. The performances are great. The writing is great. I found myself wanting something more dramatic but I think that's a result of all the hype. I guess I was desperate for this to be the one big powerhouse film this year but I'm starting to think there just wasn't one. I'll definitely be watching this one again. B+

I keep thinking about how last year I loved so many movies it was hard to think of what my favorite might have been. This year though it's more that I really liked a lot of movies but there aren't so many that I loved and the ones I did love are semi-obscure foreign movies. I didn't expect to be here scratching my head and wondering if Raging Sun, Raging Sky or Strella might really have been the best movie of the year.

EDIT: I almost forgot. I watched Pedro Almodovar's Matador last night. I had only seen it once, like ten years ago, and I don't even think I saw the whole thing. Now I've seen all of his films from start to finish at least once and I'm going back and rewatching them all, I think. I just watched the first three and now the fifth one. I have What Have I Done to Deserve This? on VHS so I'll be watching that in the next few days and then I'll move forward from there. As to the film, it seems like one of his weaker efforts. I liked it, I guess, but it seemed dated and I don't really relate to the ideas in the movie. As usual, the acting was good. In some ways it seems better than Dark Habits but it might also be less interesting. I guess he's doing some interesting things here reflecting back at cinema and playing with thriller genres but it didn't quite gel for me. B-