This are small, lesser-known films that I would never have seen or even known had I not embarked on this blog. Movies like are what make the effort all worthwhile.
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I have a feeling that a lot of trouble could have been avoided if our current president had just asked his father one simple question. “Dad,” he could have asked, “exactly why did you leave a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein in power after the 1991 Gulf War?” Bush 41 could have gone on to explain how they foresaw that power vacuum in Iraq could leave the country in a state of sectarian chaos and Iran as the sole regional power.
We wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?
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Not long before this movie came out, I spent a couple of weeks in London and, among other things, took in a production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre at Bankside. And unlike my wimpy travelling companions, who splurged for box seats, I experienced the play in true groundling fashion, huddled against the stage in a rain storm. Okay, I don’t think the groundlings of Shakespeare’s day covered themselves in plastic bags, but they would have if they’d had them.
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There is low-budget, ultra-low-budget and no-budget. I don’t know what term you’d use for a movie that could have been made with the change you dug out of your seat cushions. This is the only dramatic film made by industrial documentary filmmaker Herk Harvey, and you could be forgiven if you think you’re watching a lost episode of Twilight Zone
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You will soon be standing where we are now.
Only the young and idealistic would believe that they could reverse the course of a murderous regime with a few thousand mimeographed leaflets, but that is what the members of the White Rose, an anti-Nazi student resistance group, tried to do and that is the crime for which many of their members, including 21-year-old Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch), were executed.
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As the screenwriter of Get Shorty
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In late August of 2003, there was a special screening of this film at the Pentagon, a few months after President Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” from the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. The Department of Defense was not shy about their belief that the film offered valuable and necessary insight into the problems of fighting an insurgency in the Islamic world. In short, the American military had no illusions that the fight in Iraq was far from over, even if the politicians were pretending otherwise. If you needed any other evidence that this forty-year-old film was still uncommonly relevant and current, note the film was also banned by the French for five years after its release. Clearly, the French didn’t like to be reminded of past transgressions that far outstrip anything that U.S. forces in Iraq have been accused of.
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The most common word used to describe a movie like Miss Potter is “charming,” a word that sometimes raises silent alarm bells with me. The British have another word: “twee.” According to Merriam-Webster, “twee” means “affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint,” and, in order to succeed, a film like this has to walk that dangerously thin line between charm and “twee-ness.” Miss Potter walks it so adroitly, it feels almost effortless.
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[/types] nudity=0 violence=0 language=1 subject=2]As the least well-known of Mel Brooks’s early films, The Twelve Chairs stands well apart from the others. It’s not a spoof of other films nor is it a balls-to-the-wall farce like The Producers. While it has its slapstick elements, it also has a kind of sweetness and elements of character drama not normally found in Brooks’s filmography.
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Liev Schreiber exhibits a masterful control of tone and character in this quirky film that shifts seamlessly from quirky ethnic slapstick to something more transcendentally elegiac. Everything is Illuminated holds its secrets close until the end without cheating the audience at all.
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Whale Rider takes a premise that could have been a politically correct exercise in female empowerment and instead crafts something truly magical out of a myth-like tale of a culture in transition and a clash between two strong-willed individuals, both of whom love their people’s traditions in very different ways.
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Saraband, probably the last film from the legendary Ingmar Bergman, re-unites us with Johan and Marianne, whose divorce we watched unfold 30 years ago in 1973‘s Scenes from a Marriage. The film plays out in the form of ten extended two-handed dialogues. Bergman is able to wring an amazing amount of drama out of this deceptively simple structure.
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If I may grossly over-simplify the Ingmar Bergman worldview: we’re born, we die and in between, we treat each other like shit. The legendary Swedish filmmaker is a sheer master at pointing a camera at people and wringing buckets of genuine, truthful misery from them.
Scenes from a Marriage is a three-hour distillation of a six-part mini-series he did for Swedish television. Despite its significant length and the fact that most of the film is comprised of extended dialogues between two people, the film holds your attention in an iron grip.