From tskirvin at killfile.org  Mon Oct  5 01:20:01 2009
From: tskirvin at killfile.org (Tim Skirvin)
Date: Mon Oct  5 01:20:03 2009
Subject: Review: Zombieland (2009)
Message-ID: <tskirvin.20091005051823$3b5d@vulture.killfile.org>

  While society as a whole has been going through a Zombie
Renaissance over the last few years, I seem to have become somewhat jaded,
at least with the theatrical side of things.  The problem is two-fold: I've
caught up with the *good* zombie movies that the genre has produced, and
I've read a succession of increasingly well-thought-out zombie books and
comics.  Knowing where the zombie genre has been and where it is going, it's
hard to watch movies that are either caught in the past (the re-make of
_Dawn of the Dead_) or heading off in the entirely different direction of
Fast Zombies (_28 Days Later_).  And yet, I remain fascinated enough to go
to see the movies as they come out, and I doubt that will change any time
soon.

  _Zombieland_ is an interesting stop on this road: a zombie movie
that barely relies on the zombies for more than laughs.  Oh, it's certainly
not the first zombie-based comedy; Troma has been making them for years,
and _Shaun of the Dead_ is likely to remain the pinnacle of that particular
genre for decades to come.  And just about any zombie movie of any value
whatsoever has delved into zombies being a dark reflection of society.  But
in this case, the zombies become not just props, but victims of prop
comedy; and most of the time, they aren't even present except as the unseen
trigger of our characters' neuroses.

  That's not to say that there aren't zombies and gore and all of the
standard stuff.  They're all there, mostly in the opening credits sequence
and the first and last 20 minutes of the film; but really, the only thing
that they do is force reactions.  The "rules" of surviving a zombie
apocalypse (zombocalypse?) are laid out in a slap-stick and visual manner,
with the deaths of humans and zombies are alike played for laughs as well
as emphasis; that done, they only come out every now and then to drive the
plot.  

  What's interesting about this is that it works.  This movie is
*trying to be an average movie*.  Yes, there are zombies and gore and death;
but the heart of this movie is two post-teenagers trying to make their way
in the world and falling in love (or at least realizing that they like each
other).  This is a coming-of-age comedy, but instead of controlling parents
and career angst, there are hunts for supplies and the ever-present threat
of an attacker behind a closed door.  This doesn't always work - there are
simply too many survivors out of the seven-member cast for that - but there
were definitely moments of brilliance mixed in there, and I never really
felt bored.

  I suspect that we're going to see more of this direction over the
next few years, both the horror-comedy aspect and life-in-post-apocalyptia.
I kindof hope it works out, but I'm dubious; this movie would have suffered
from heading much further in either direction, and it wasn't that great in
the first place.

  It seems necessary to drag out the two-part movie scale for a movie
like this.  It set out to be a pretty-good-but-silly movie; and on that
front it did an adequate job.  I came out of the movie feeling not offended
and not impressed, but at least satisfied.  Its goals were not lofty, but
they were interesting.  I can respect that.

  ** 1/2 / **

  Oh, and if for some reason you need to see some of the reading
material that has made me jaded: "World War Z", by Max Brooks, is a quite
excellent novel.  "Walking Dead" is an ongoing comic book series that
explores the longer-term path of survival (and is due to have a TV series
based on it out next year).  And if you're looking for something that's not
going to make it to the big or small screen, I highly recommend "Zombie
Night at the Gotham Aquarium" in Hitman 13-14.  Zombie sharks!  Yay!

                           - Tim Skirvin (tskirvin@killfile.org)
-- 
http://wiki.killfile.org/           Skirv's Homepage <FISH>< <*>
http://wiki.killfile.org/reviews/movies    Skirv's Movie Reviews

From mleeper at optonline.net  Tue Oct  6 15:08:58 2009
From: mleeper at optonline.net (Mark R. Leeper)
Date: Tue Oct  6 15:09:01 2009
Subject: Review: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)
Message-ID: <op.u1d0z9gvy83cp7@mail-hub.optonline.net>

                CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: Yet another digital 3-D animated film comes
     out this year.  Giant food is falling from the sky
     in this un-engaging children's adventure.  After UP
     set a standard for character development, CLOUDY WITH
     A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS falls short.  There is not much
     logic and not very interesting characters in this
     story suggested by (but not taken from) the children's
     book of the same name.  Phil Lord and Christ Miller
     share writing and directing credits.  If you are a
     little nauseated by the thought of a place like
     Candyland, don't go to Swallow Falls where food falls
     on you from the sky.  Rating: low +1 (-4 to +4) or 5/10

Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader) lives on Swallow Falls, an
Atlantic island whose major industry is sardines.  But sardines are
not popular any more, and the island is in economic crisis.  Flint
does not want to go into the dying sardine business.  Instead he
wants desperately to be an inventor.  Sadly, none of his inventions
ever seem to work as intended.  Flint has become the island's joke.
With an echo of OCTOBER SKY, Flint's father has little interest in
his son's inventions and just wants his son to go into the sardine
business.  Flint thinks sardines are icky.  His new invention turns
water into any food requested.  Tell it what food you want and it
is there, not unlike a "Deep Space Nine" food replicator.

For some strange reason the food replicator can fly like a rocket
and ends up sitting motionless over the island replicating
requested food and dropping it on the island in giant food storms.
(No, I mean the storms are giant, not the food.  Okay, as the
trailer shows that comes later.)  Now Flint has a successful and
even well-loved invention and the town is grateful.  But this is
only the start of the situation.  Free food in of any type and
quantity is not so good as it seems at first.  Some people are
growing very fat.  The film has themes of healthy eating; a theme
of people who are afraid to show their intelligence; a related
theme that is it okay to be a nerd; father-son relationship themes;
and more--all on a very superficial level.  Just when you start to
dwell on one of the film's messages, an action scene comes along to
distract the viewer.  The pace of the films is fast, but the story
seems to make less and less sense as it goes along.  It could have
some intelligence if it concentrated on fewer distractions.  Maybe
it could have expanded on one theme like the father-son
relationship.  But the film seems intent on hiding the intelligence
it might hold.

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS is full of imaginative food
adventures and visually it is quite creative with visual puns with
edibles.  And in digital 3-D these are even nicer to watch.  But
once the audience is used to giant foodscapes they do not add a
whole lot.

Somehow the logic of the film just does not work for me.  Nobody on
the island seems to notice that Flint has created some potentially
world-shattering inventions, least of all Flint himself.  One would
make it possible to understand the language of higher animals, in
this case a monkey.  (Didn't we see the same device in UP?)  One
creates instant, flexible, permanent, spray-on insulation.  One
keeps a craft aloft in the stratosphere indefinitely above a
certain point in the North Atlantic.  And one--of particular
interest here--could feed all the hungry of the world using nothing
but water.  Any one of these inventions would have fabulous
applications.  There are only three problems holding this genius
back.  One is that like Wile E. Coyote, Flint gives up on each of
his inventions after the first setback.  He has no imagination as
to where his inventions will find their greatest application.  Phil
Lord and Chris Miller do not appear to have given any thought at
all to the implications of the situation they have set up.  The
character and those situations apparently do not appear in the book
of the same title by Judi and Ron Barrett and were created
exclusively by Lord and Miller.

The film first tempts us with the food and then rubs our noses in
it.  A year ago this might have been considered a better 3-D film.
But films like UP have raised the bar and this one does not measure
up.  I rate CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS a low +1 on the -4 to
+4 scale or 5/10.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0844471/>

What others are saying: <http://tinyurl.com/cloud-meatball>

					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper@optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper

From steve.rhodes at internetreviews.com  Tue Oct  6 15:16:24 2009
From: steve.rhodes at internetreviews.com (Steve Rhodes)
Date: Tue Oct  6 15:16:28 2009
Subject: Review: Whip It (2009)
Message-ID: <HNydnXfnX8DizFfXnZ2dnUVZ_sWdnZ2d@earthlink.com>

WHIP IT
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2009 Steve Rhodes

RATING (0 TO ****):  ***

As daring as she is petite, Babe Ruthless of "The Hurl Scouts" zips through 
her burlier competition in the skating rink.  She may be the smallest person 
on her women's roller derby team, but she can really take a licking and keep 
on ticking.

Off the court, Babe is known as Bliss Cavendar, a high school senior in 
Bodeen, a tiny town in Texas.  When she is not working as a waitress at a 
local diner called the Oink Joint, a kitschy place with a big pink pig 
statue on top of it, Bliss sneaks off to her would-be new life in Austin as 
a roller derby dame.  Still, back in Bodeen, there is work to be done, 
including offering the diner's signature menu item -- the "squealer" -- to 
customers.  Eat a squealer, a monster size BBQ sandwich in less than three 
minutes and you get a free meal and your name on the squealer hall of fame 
board.

Drew Barrymore, in her feature film directorial debut, manages to get a 
sweet but remarkably bland performance from Academy Award nominee Ellen Page 
(JUNO).  In a role that cries out for quirkiness, Barrymore has Page playing 
it as straight as possible.  Since Page is the queen of quirk, this makes 
little sense.  Still, the result is a solid performance in an entertaining 
movie.  But, while WHIP IT is consistently cute, it is sadly never more than 
that.  I expected hilarious, but, instead, found myself watching a film 
worth many smiles but few laughs.

Don't get me wrong, I liked all of the characters in WHIP IT, but none very 
much, save Bliss, whose winsome smile is hard to resist.

WHIP IT features lots of roller derby action and has a sterling support 
cast, including Jimmy Fallon as Johnny "Hot Tub" Rocket, the roller derby's 
cheesy announcer, Juliette Lewis as Iron Maven, the tough-as-nails star 
player on the Hurl Scouts' rival team, and Alia Shawkat as Pash, Bliss's 
loyal and reliable friend and fellow waitress.

Marcia Gay Harden, in a key role as Bliss's mother Brooke, never quite 
figures out what she wants to do with her character.  Bliss is torn between 
her new love of being a roller derby girl and being a dutiful daughter who 
is expected to follow in her mother's footsteps by winning the Miss Blue 
Bonnet beauty contest.  Brooke is kind of strange but never strange enough 
to be a mystery worth solving.

This much is certain.  Watching all of the roller derby action is 
consistently a lot of fun. If you've never seen roller derby before, just 
image an unscripted and slightly more serious version of the WWE in which 
the wrestlers were actually competing.

WHIP IT runs 1:41.  It is rated PG-13 for "sexual content including crude 
dialogue, language and drug material" and would be acceptable for kids 
around 10 and up.

The film is playing now in nationwide in the United States.  In the Silicon 
Valley, it is showing at the AMC theaters, the Cinemark theaters and the 
Camera Cinemas.

Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com

***********************************************************************

Want reviews of new films via Email?
Just write Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com and put "subscribe" in the 
subject line.

From kamhung.soh at gmail.com  Tue Oct  6 15:35:12 2009
From: kamhung.soh at gmail.com (Kam-Hung Soh)
Date: Tue Oct  6 15:35:15 2009
Subject: Retrospective: Mortadelo & Filemon - The Big Adventure (2003)
Message-ID: <h9hn2r$fv8$1@aioe.org>

La gran aventura de Mortadelo y Filem?n / Mortadelo & Filemon: The Big 
Adventure (2003)
Review by Kam-Hung Soh 2009.

Filem?n (Benito Pocino) and Mortadelo (Pepe Viyuela) are two agents of 
the TIA (T?cnicos de Investigaci?n Aeroterr?quea), a secret government 
organization. They are assigned to retrieve a stolen device from 
Tirania, whose dictator has declared war on England by dropping a giant 
ball of dung on the Queen's palace. Complicating their mission is that 
their boss, El Super (Mariano Venancio), has sent super agent Fredy 
Mazas (Dominique Pinon) on the same task earlier, and Fredy has turned 
rogue and is trying to kill them.

Based on a long-running Spanish comic book series 'Mortadelo y Filem?n' 
by Francisco Ib??ez, writer-director Javier Fesser and co-writer 
Guillermo Fesser have created a colourful and surreal world of secret 
agents, crazy gadgets and violent cartoon slapstick humour (people are 
squashed into pancakes, survive explosions with no ill effect other than 
a black face, leave man-shaped indentations when they run into doors, 
etc.). The plot takes a while to get into gear and oddly enough, the two 
principals don't cause as much mayhem as expected.

A lot of the jokes are rather ponderous and are slow to set up, and not 
having read the comic books, I suspect I missed many of the sight gags. 
My kids found parts of the film hilarious, rather like Lisa and Bart 
Simpson when they watch 'Itchy and Scratchy'.

Spanish with English subtitles.

2 out of 5 stars.

http://vibogafi.blogspot.com/2009/09/review-la-gran-aventura-de-mortadelo-y.html

-- 
Kam-Hung Soh
http://vibogafi.blogspot.com

From steve.rhodes at internetreviews.com  Tue Oct  6 15:36:19 2009
From: steve.rhodes at internetreviews.com (Steve Rhodes)
Date: Tue Oct  6 15:36:22 2009
Subject: Review: Surrogates (2009)
Message-ID: <BaKdnTVjIugL5yDXnZ2dnUVZ_hidnZ2d@earthlink.com>

SURROGATES
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2009 Steve Rhodes

RATING (0 TO ****):  ** 1/2

SURROGATES proves that having a great concept tells you nothing about the 
quality of the resulting production.  Always intriguing but never involving, 
SURROGATES manages never to be bad while still never being good either.  As 
it plods along, you'll likely have the same reaction I did, which was to be 
always quite curious about where the plot was heading, while never caring 
about any of the characters themselves.  When you leave the theater, you 
probably won't be smiling or frowning, but just shrugging your shoulders as 
I did.

Directed lamely and with little imagination by Jonathan Mostow, the movie is 
like a beautiful balloon that has lost all of its air.  This is surprising 
since Mostow has brought us such other very satisfying films as TERMINATOR 
3: THE RISE OF THE MACHINES and U-571.  This time, however, he is never able 
to breathe any life into the film.

Nonetheless, I was never bored, since the basis of the story is quite 
intriguing.  Set in a hyper-safe future, humans no long need to worry about 
harm to themselves, since they never leave home.  Relaxing in their favorite 
comfortable chair and using a machine hooked to their brains, they control 
their surrogates, which exist outside in what used to be thought of as the 
real world.

The surrogates generally look like their operators -- although they don't 
have to -- but younger and without any skin blemishes.  The effective look 
is more creepy than attractive.  The surrogates kept reminding me of a Botox 
abuser.  These surrogates are hard to kill and have some never completely 
defined superhuman skills, such as being able to effortlessly jump fifty 
feet in the air.  Their operators get to surreptitiously experience all 
traditional human activities, including sex, which is now really, really 
safe.

The predicament that the surrogates of police officers Greer (Bruce Willis) 
and Peters (Radha Mitchell) find themselves in is that someone has 
discovered how to accomplish the previously eradicated feat of murder -- not 
of the surrogates but of their human operators.  This had been assumed to be 
completely impossible.  While this setup might sound promising, the movie 
never does much with it, recycling lots of old story ideas into the script. 
Yes, there will be an evil corporation responsible for everything, and yes, 
at the head of the company will be a megalomaniac who is a despicable bad 
guy who is doing horrible things for what he considers the best of reasons.

SURROGATES has one major missing ingredient -- humor.  Taking itself way too 
seriously and paced too slowly, it makes its short running time feel much 
longer than it actually is.

SURROGATES runs 1:28.  It is rated PG-13 for "intense sequences of violence, 
disturbing images, language, sexuality and a drug-related scene" and would 
be acceptable for kids around 9 and up.

My son Jeffrey, age 20, gave it ** 1/2, remarking that he had never felt 
quite this way about a film.  With a who-cares kind of a look, he said that 
he didn't dislike the movie, but he didn't like it either.  He liked the 
concept but said the acting by both the humans and the surrogates was 
robotic.  Finally, he didn't like the ending at all, finding it to be little 
more than a popular cliche.

The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday, September 25, 
2009.  In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the AMC theaters, the 
Cinemark theaters and the Camera Cinemas.

Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com

***********************************************************************

Want reviews of new films via Email?
Just write Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com and put "subscribe" in the 
subject line.

From homeryen88 at gmail.com  Tue Oct  6 15:42:39 2009
From: homeryen88 at gmail.com (Homer Yen)
Date: Tue Oct  6 15:42:42 2009
Subject: Review: 9 (2009)
Message-ID: <4a52a9000909292121q51d4e7a4q81acab0aa69cf8d5@mail.gmail.com>

"9" - From Rags Come Riches
by Homer Yen
(c) 2009

Not too long ago, a UCLA film student named Shane Acker created as his
short subject a visionary world in which (and this is going to sound
bizarre) a sentient being that looks like a voodoo rag doll fights for
survival in a post-apocalyptic world.  It is called "9" and it
garnered an Oscar nomination in 2006.  In fact, you can get a glimpse
of his 10-minute short film, presented in high-quality, at this
YouTube.com address (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IQcMeNh7Hc).

It caught the attention of some Hollywood movers and shakers, who
subsequently decided to fund and develop a feature length film around
this premise.  And now, you can see that tense 80-minute adventure
playing at your local cineplex.  If you like your science-fiction
layered with a smidgen of darkness, lots of action as underdogs
struggle for survival, and an endless stream of inventive ideas, then
this film will not disappoint.  Though it is animated fare, it is
decidedly designed for the PG-13 crowd.  It's not as white-knuckle
tense as "District 9" but it is certainly more adult-oriented than
"Wall*E".

In the opening scene, our hero and titular character (voiced by Elijah
Woods) awakens in a lab.  His life has just started.  He pushes open
the windows of the room in which he is in.  The camera pans back to
reveal a devastated landscape that has resulted from a cataclysmic
war.  This is not going to be a pleasant life.  Not much is left here
in this place and time.  Actually, "not much" is too generous.  The
planet is now a heap of wreckage.  All that moves, perhaps, are other
similar-looking voodoo-doll beings that were also brought to life
through arcane magic.  Who are they?  What do they represent?  Why is
9 the last of the bunch?  These are all interesting questions that
they story eventually reveals.  Meanwhile, also lurking in the shadows
and hunting them down is a mechanical, one-eyed beast.

What you'll first notice is the visual brilliance of the film, filled
with sumptuous renderings.  There is a remarkable level of attention
to detail.  Take our hero, for example.  His skin has the pronounced
texture of a burlap sack.  When his eyes blink, it reminds you of the
opening and closing of shutter from an old-style 35mm camera.  The
buildings within this desolate landscape are larger than life.  The
cathedral and the library are not immense structures by themselves.
But, when you consider that these sentient rag dolls appear to be no
more than a foot tall, it makes otherwise ordinary buildings appear
cavernous and foreboding.  Meanwhile, the enemy creatures that 9 and
his brethren have to contend with are fearsome contraptions indeed.
The visual effects, the sound effects, the dark landscape come
together to create a lush otherworldly experience.

Back in the 90s, I was transfixed by a computer game called MYST.
Anyone every play it?  It was a CD-ROM graphic adventure video game
for the PC.  Its critical success was due to the fact that the game
impressively immersed players into its fictional otherworld.  "9"
evokes that same incredible feeling.

Grade:	B+

S:	0 out of 3
L:	0 out of 3
V:	2 out of 3

From mleeper at optonline.net  Tue Oct  6 15:44:11 2009
From: mleeper at optonline.net (Mark R. Leeper)
Date: Tue Oct  6 15:44:13 2009
Subject: Review: The Informant! (2009)
Message-ID: <op.u021omfqy83cp7@mail-hub.optonline.net>

                          THE INFORMANT!
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: This is the mostly true story about the
     rising executive at ADM who turned whistle-blower
     for the FBI and for a few years was the best
     corporate inside informant that the FBI had ever
     had.  But in the shady world of industrial espionage
     the truth becomes highly processed before it reaches
     anyone's ears.  This is a complex tale that had been
     done well on Public Radio, but in Steven Soderbergh's
     hands and with some very strange stylistic choices
     the story becomes muddled and more confusing than
     necessary.  Soderbergh adapts Scott Z. Burns's
     screenplay based on Kurt Eichenwald's book.
     Rating +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10

In 2000 the Chicago Public Radio program "This American Life" ran a
story about Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) executive Mark Whitacre
and his experiences having turned informant for the FBI.  That same
month Kurt Eichenwald published a book on the same story.  A
screenwriter, presumably Scott Z. Burns, heard the program and saw
the cinematic possibilities of the story.  The result is THE
INFORMANT!, with Matt Damon in the title role of Mark Whitacre.

ADM is a giant conglomerate that makes additives and raw materials
for grain-based food.  Whitacre was an important executive in the
BioProducts Division who claimed to the FBI that a spy in the
corporation was sabotaging their lysine production.  He said that a
Japanese contact had told him that he could have the name of the
spy for $10 million.  Working with the FBI, Whitacre also offered
them information that his own company was conspiring to price-fix.
This became a long, complex, and frequently humorous, relationship
between Whitmore and FBI Special Agent Brian Shepard (Scott
Bakula).  At first Whitacre is incredibly cooperative and provides
superb evidence of the price fix.  But with time the value of
Whitacre's character and his evidence comes into question.

Having enjoyed the radio broadcast of the story, I expected to
enjoy just as much the film version.  Soderbergh surprisingly
muddles the story, both in the writing and in his choices for the
visual style.  The dialog comes fast and the storyline is
frequently hard to follow with cues from the musical score to
indicate what just happened was really whacky.  This is a current
film and it covers events of the 1990s, but it has cameo roles for
1960s comics Tom and Dick Smothers.  So far that is fine.  But the
font for the frequent labels is of the style that would have been
used on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.  It is sort of a
psychedelic flower-petal font.  And the music frequently is
reminiscent of the Smothers Brothers' style.  All this completely
evokes the wrong era.  The entire film looks dulled-out as if it
had been filmed in 16mm and blown up to a larger format.
Backgrounds frequently have all detail washed out in bright light.
The image quality is substandard.  A message at the beginning of
the film that tells us that some of what is in the film cannot be
taken literally ends with "So there!"  That appears to be a joke
borrowed from AIRPLANE!.  The settings jump from country to
country, not unlike films from Matt Damon's Bourne franchise, but
the scenes have absolutely no feel that they really are from those
countries.

On the other hand Matt Damon looks very believable as an
unglamorous Every-man.  This ability to not look magnetic is not
easy for an actor so familiar.  The ability to look non-descript
served him well in THE GOOD SHEPHERD and serves him well again.
Toward the end he even loses his hair to (a Ron Howard sort of)
male pattern baldness.  I am not always fond of Damon's acting, but
I liked him here.  Additional acting surprises, beyond the presence
of the Smothers Brothers, are a very straight role for Clancy
Brown, best known perhaps as the sadistic guard in THE SHAWSHANK
REDEMPTION.  Here he is in a role that did not require his stature,
but in which he is surprisingly believable.  Whitacre's
philosophical musings in the narration are a definite plus.

The choice of the story is quite good, but the radio version (a
link is provided below) is probably a bit preferable.  I rate this
film a straight +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10.  It is a new
group running ADM these days, but I wonder how they are taking this
negative publicity.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1130080/>

What others are saying:
<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1200661-informant/>

This American Life version:
<http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=168>


					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper@optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper

From tskirvin at killfile.org  Thu Oct  8 01:31:25 2009
From: tskirvin at killfile.org (Tim Skirvin)
Date: Thu Oct  8 01:31:28 2009
Subject: Review: The Informant! (2009)
Message-ID: <tskirvin.20091008052959$64c8@vulture.killfile.org>

  I still feel a little bit disappointed in myself for not seeing
_The Informant!_ when I was recently visiting Illinois.  I grew up about an
hour down the road from Decatur, where the movie takes place; and while ADM
was less of an odd, evil fixture in our lives than for those down the road,
it still had an impact.  But rather than driving an hour out of my way to
see it, I waited until I was back home in California.  But the Illinois feel
was certainly still there.

  _The Informant!_ tells the story of Mark Whitacre, an executive at
Archer Daniels Midland, and his role in an FBI investigation into a
price-fixing scandal in the mid-1990s.  It's hard to argue that the
background isn't boring; such white-collar crime rarely fails to inspire
yawns in those that hear about it, even when the stakes are as high as they
were here.  But the movie solves that problem by spending its time focusing
on Whitacre himself, from his background to his eccentricities.  It's not
that the case is so interesting; it's that Whitacre is so *weird*.

  The movie is played for laughs, albeit extremely dark ones.
Whitacre (Matt Damon) narrates many scenes with a series of random
monologues that almost relate to what's going on, but mostly just share
some of his state of mind.  While these monologues distract from what's
actually happening on screen, this actually *improves* the movie; this
intentional misdirection lets us spot incongruities and not worry about
them very much, only to realize later that some of those would have given
the story away.  I like that kind of thing.

  The movie's true humor came in two pieces: the expressions on
various people's faces as they try to comprehend what Whitacre was saying
to them, and the musical choices during the various high-tension scenes.  I
certainly guffawed through much of the movie, in that way that makes me
wonder if I'm the only one in the room doing so.  That's worth something.

  My biggest gripe with the movie was that the license plates were
off - they were using modern Illinois plates on all of the cars, going back
to 1992.  Yes, this is nit-picky; but since they were otherwise trying to
play up the period-ness of the sets, it was a bit glaring to me to see that
detail.  Still, that hardly detracted from seeing a car going down the
corn-lined roads of my childhood.  

  I can see why this movie got mixed reviews, but count me on the
"amused" side of the line.  It's smart, funny, and just a tad random.
Recommended.

  ***

                           - Tim Skirvin (tskirvin@killfile.org)
-- 
http://wiki.killfile.org/           Skirv's Homepage <FISH>< <*>
http://wiki.killfile.org/reviews/movies    Skirv's Movie Reviews

From steve.rhodes at internetreviews.com  Sat Oct 10 11:14:06 2009
From: steve.rhodes at internetreviews.com (Steve Rhodes)
Date: Sat Oct 10 11:14:09 2009
Subject: Review: Coco Before Chanel (2009)
Message-ID: <_8mdnZbOOYCmnk3XnZ2dnUVZ_tydnZ2d@earthlink.com>

COCO BEFORE CHANEL
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2009 Steve Rhodes

RATING (0 TO ****):  **

COCO BEFORE CHANEL (COCO AVANT CHANEL), a droll and humorless story, tells 
us the background of a famous woman for whom smiling did not come easily or 
often.  A movie that could have been more clearly titled COCO CHANEL -- THE 
EARLY YEARS, it is a lifeless rendition of the early life of Gabrielle 
'Coco' Chanel before she became a famous fashion designer in Paris.

Audrey Tautou (AMELIE) plays Coco, who, we are told and shown, was a fashion 
anarchist from the beginning.  With an almost religious belief in the 
importance of simplicity, her creations for herself and others firmly 
eschewed flowers, feathers, and, most of all, the corsets that were 
considered essential for women in the late nineteenth century when Coco was 
starting her career.  Coco loved to ridicule dresses that were so tight that 
the women were not able to breathe properly.  For herself, she favored loose 
fitting, boyish clothes that were rather androgynous.

When we first meet Gabrielle, before she is given the nickname of Coco, she 
and her sister Adrienne (Marie Gillain) are working as seamstresses by day 
and waitresses and would-be nightclub singers by night.  At a glance, they 
look alike, except that Coco likes to wear checks while Adrienne prefers 
stripes.  While they both strive to make it in the world, they view life 
differently.  This is best shown in a scene one night in the tiny apartment 
which they share, as they do its only bed.  Before going to sleep, the 
hard-driven Coco admonishes her more romantically inclined sister that "love 
is best in fairy tales."

A sad, quiet character, Coco goes to live with Mr. Balsan (Benoit 
Poelvoorde), a wealthy aristocrat who treats her with equal measures of 
disdain and affection.  Since she isn't of his class, he likes to hide her 
when his rich friends come to party.  When she meets Arthur Capel 
(Alessandro Nivola), who goes by his nickname of Boy, he is reading a book 
that sounds designed for her -- "Contradictions: The Philosophy of Misery." 
Although they fall in love, they seem destined for unhappiness.

Coco's life is a headlong rush into a bizarre mixture of sadness and 
success.  Her love life is as consistently unsuccessful as we already know 
that her fashion designs will prove to be enormously successful.  In a brief 
epilogue, we watch a miserable Coco inspecting her models as she puts on 
what appears to be the showing of her first collection.

The net result is a movie that appears to be as clinically accurate as it is 
completely uninviting.  I stayed awake, but you might not.

COCO BEFORE CHANEL runs 1:45.  The film is in French with English subtitles. 
It is rated PG-13 for "sexual content and smoking" and would be acceptable 
for kids around 8 and up.

The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday, October 2, 2009. 
In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the Cinemark Theaters and the 
Camera Cinemas.

Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com

***********************************************************************

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Just write Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com and put "subscribe" in the 
subject line.

From mleeper at optonline.net  Sun Oct 11 16:21:16 2009
From: mleeper at optonline.net (Mark R. Leeper)
Date: Sun Oct 11 16:21:18 2009
Subject: Review: Mary and Max (2009)
Message-ID: <op.u1nfhzhhy83cp7@mail-hub.optonline.net>

                            MARY AND MAX
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: Witty animation tells this story in just
     about the only way it could be told pleasantly.
     A lonely Melbourne eight-year-old picks a random
     name from a New York City phonebook and begins what
     will become a correspondence of many years.  At the
     other end is a New York City man suffering from
     Asperger's syndrome.  From opposite ends of the world
     the two can say anything to each other, and the clay
     animation lets us see what their minds' eyes are
     seeing.  The story is wise and funny in ways it could
     not be in live action.  Oscar-winner Adam Elliot
     directs while almost unrecognizably Toni Collette and
     Philip Seymour Hoffman voice the two main roles.
     Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10

This could be the golden age of animated films, but nearly always
the films are have frothy, silly themes.  Hamburgers fall from the
sky or balloons pull a house up into it.  Very rarely does a
director with a serious theme use animation and give us a GRAVE OF
THE FIREFLIES or a WALTZ WITH BASHIR.  Adam Elliot, who won the
Best Short Animated Film Oscar in 2003 for "Harvie Krumpet" gives
us the bittersweet epistolary relationship between Mary Daisy
Dinkle and Max Jerry Horovitz.  And it is all rendered in clay.
Mary (voiced by Bethany Whitmore as a child, Toni Collette as an
adult) is at the beginning an eight-year-old living a lower-class
life in a suburb of Melbourne in 1976.  Her mother seems to live
on nipping sherry and stealing from the grocers.  With a silly
question about where babies come from she picks a random name, Max
Jerry Horovitz, from a New York telephone book and writes to Max
to find where babies come from in the United States.  Max is, it
turns out, a morbidly obese New York Jewish man who suffers from
Asperger's syndrome.  The unlikely couple forms a relationship
that lasts for two decades.  Each has bizarre viewpoints on the
real world and the way the world is, and Elliot renders their
minds' eye visions in animation.  Their relationship is by turns
comical and painful.

We look at Max's lonely life ruled by frequently pointless order.
He is almost devoid of human companionship and happy to strike up
a friendship with this young Australian.  Director Elliot uses a
style of a black-and-while world with just one or two objects in
the picture in color.  Mary gets to live in a color world, but one
that is not very pleasant.  The film does not clean up the rough
edges of life; it glories in them.  And Max's life is almost all
rough edges.  But by keeping the telling simple, as it is in the
letters, we are not dragged into the tragedy with full impact of
Max's or Mary's situations.  With time Mary is able to transcend
her environment and even turn what she learned from her
relationship with Max into her career.  Max never has that
strength and the real tragedy is his.

This is not the sort of 3-D animated film we have seen of late.
The Claymation is perfect, but it always allows us to feel for the
characters, never to minimize them.  They never get into fights or
have to race anywhere.  These are simple characters rendered more
likable by the comic distortion of the clay artwork.  There is
little real plot to this film but the characters are foremost.

While the film tells us that it is based on a true story--and it
is a story that Adam Elliot should know well--there was no Mary.
The film is based on Elliot's own correspondence with an
Asberger's sufferer in the United States.  Elliot is telling his
own story with wit and charm.

This original film took five years to make.  There is a lot of
wisdom to it and it covers a great deal in a deceptively simple-
seeming package.  I rate MARY AND MAX a low +2 on the -4 to +4
scale or 7/10.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0978762/>

What others are saying:
<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/10010721-mary_and_max/>



					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper@optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper

From mleeper at optonline.net  Thu Oct 15 09:56:42 2009
From: mleeper at optonline.net (Mark R. Leeper)
Date: Thu Oct 15 09:56:44 2009
Subject: Retrospective: Guns on the Clackamas (1995)
Message-ID: <op.u1ssxpl9y83cp7@mail-hub.optonline.net>

             GUNS ON THE CLACKAMAS: A DOCUMENTARY (1995)
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: This is an over-the-top mock documentary.
     GUNS ON THE CLACKAMAS: A DOCUMENTARY covers the
     making of an epic western film.  It is being made
     in spite of the bad luck of having several actors
     die before the film is complete while the director
     has to work around the problem.  Co-written and
     directed by animator Bill Plympton, this film is
     uneven both in its humor and in its appeal.
     Rating: low +1 (-4 to +4) or 5/10

Bill Plympton is in a class by himself with his imaginative,
anarchic animation.  He will show people going through
transformations that can best be described as "topological".
People's smiles will turn them inside out or a woman's breasts
will transform into hot-air balloons and carry her off into the
sky.  His films are visually creative and rarely have a lot of
story.  That makes it ironic that he would try his hand at a live-
action film that limits him mostly to verbal humor.  He did,
however, attempt crossing over in 1995 when he co-wrote and
directed his second live-action comedy.  To be more specific, GUNS
ON THE CLACKAMAS is a mockumentary following the problems
encountered in trying to make an epic western called GUNS ON THE
CLACKAMAS.  There have been some very good comedies about
Hollywood and film production.  Among them are DAY FOR NIGHT,
HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD, and LIVING IN OBLIVION.  Plympton has a lot
of competition and does not really come off a winner.

In the film we follow an adoring British filmmaker following the
shooting of a new film by the "Producer/Genius" Holton P. Jeffers.
Of course, to the viewer Jeffers seems to be making every possible
mistake, including some mistakes nobody has ever made before.  The
production of the film is plagued with the sort of bizarre problem
that one rarely thinks about with filmmaking.  One actress talks
normally off-stage, but in front of the camera she is reduced to
severe stuttering.  Sadly, she is the girlfriend of the executive
producer and cannot be fired.  Another actor has breath bad enough
to fell the leading lady.  The film has a barrage of problems that
would intimidate a Terry Gilliam.

Plympton's style is to show some odd feature of the story and just
keep shaking it in the viewer's face in the hopes that if it was
funny at first it will remain so, and if it was not funny it will
eventually seem funny.  There are extended gags about an associate
producer who is in love with kitsch popular paintings of children
and animals with very large eyes.  We see much more than we need
to of this art and the gag seems borrowed from Arthur Hiller's THE
IN-LAWS.  We hear about the stuttering problem in clinical detail,
which does not make it any funnier.

The film is shot so it seems like a grainy, low-budget affair.
But what we are seeing is intended to be a cheap documentary with
a rather arrogant, pretentious narrator/host.  The film might work
better if this narrator at least showed some surprise at the
incompetence of what he is seeing.  But none of the characters in
the film are very believable and the film might have worked better
as a farce not quite so exaggerated.

Humor is, of course, very subjective.  Judging from other reviews
of this comedy, some critics found GUNS ON THE CLACKAMAS hilarious
and some were on a completely different wavelength from the film.
I found some if the ideas amusing, though lacking in their
execution.  They might have been better illustrated with
Plympton's surreal cartoons than with the flat performances
Plympton gets in live action.  Particular fans of Plympton may
find the film more rewarding than the typical film fan.  I rate
GUNS ON THE CLACKAMAS: A DOCUMENTARY a low +1 on the -4 to +4
scale or 5/10.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0113239>

What others are saying:
<http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0113239/externalreviews>


					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper@optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper

From steve.rhodes at internetreviews.com  Fri Oct 16 01:34:50 2009
From: steve.rhodes at internetreviews.com (Steve Rhodes)
Date: Fri Oct 16 01:34:53 2009
Subject: Review: Law Abiding Citizen (2009)
Message-ID: <l8-dnbWjtLgUYErXnZ2dnUVZ_oSdnZ2d@earthlink.com>

LAW ABIDING CITIZEN
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2009 Steve Rhodes

RATING (0 TO ****):  ** 1/2

LAW ABIDING CITIZEN, by director F. Gary Gray (BE COOL), is a very gory, 
revenge thriller that never loses your interest even if its preposterous 
plot usually requires a generous suspension of disbelief.  But for all of 
the promises of the narrative, which is filled with many genuine twists and 
shocks, the overall result is surprising flat.

As the story starts, we meet cocksure prosecutor Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), 
who, of course, brags about his conviction rate -- 96%.  Gerard Butler, who 
manages to disappoint in almost of his performances, plays Clyde Shelton, a 
crime victim who is filled with outrage and palpable anger.  Nick is about 
to cut a deal, which will mean only one of the two criminals who slaughtered 
Clyde's wife and daughter before his eyes will be executed.  "It's not what 
you know," Nick calmly explains to Clyde about the plea bargain he has 
arranged with one of the murderers.  "It's what you can prove in court."

Cut to ten years later, when we find out that Pennsylvania appears to be one 
of the few states in the nation that actually puts to death people who are 
sentenced to death.  With one criminal out on bail and with one about to be 
given a lethal injection, Clyde starts springing his diabolical and 
outlandish schemes to bring retribution to everyone in the judicial system 
that he feels wronged him. The list appears to approach something like 
infinity.

Eventually Clyde becomes "safely" entombed in solitary confinement in a 
secure prison facility, but even that will not stop his "biblical" 
retribution on the outside world.  As the warden reluctantly agrees to 
Clyde's whimsical demands -- a better bed, a prime steak and an iPod -- so 
that Clyde will not kill people, it appears that either Clyde must have an 
accomplice on the outside or he must have some superhuman smarts.

As the body count mounts, will Nick be able to stop Clyde's non-stop 
devastation?  While not giving anything away, one can assume that Clyde will 
not be successful in depopulating the planet before someone figures out what 
he is doing.  And, since Foxx has an Academy Award and his character does 
have that 96% conviction rate, it is probably a safe bet that Nick will 
survive and be the salvation that rescues the world from the Wrath of Clyde.

LAW ABIDING CITIZEN runs 1:48.  It is rated R for "strong bloody brutal 
violence and torture, a scene of rape, and pervasive language" and would be 
acceptable for teenagers and older.

The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday, October 16, 2009. 
In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the AMC theaters, the Cinemark 
theaters and the Camera Cinemas.

Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com

***********************************************************************

Want reviews of new films via Email?
Just write Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com and put "subscribe" in the 
subject line.

From avaction at gmail.com  Mon Oct 19 00:25:34 2009
From: avaction at gmail.com (avaction)
Date: Mon Oct 19 00:25:38 2009
Subject: Review: Pickman's Muse (2009)
Message-ID: <86b8897e-9de6-4663-a31c-13f5f2cb1aa8@j4g2000yqa.googlegroups.com>

Starring: Barret Walz, Maurice McNicholas, Tom Lodewyk
Written & Directed By: Robert Cappelletto
Grade: B

Pickman's Muse is inspired by the H.P Lovecraft stories, "Haunter of
the Dark" and "Pickman's Model." A major motif in the film is The
Church of Starry Wisdom, also the center of Lovecraft's telling. It is
a loose telling of the events with certain similar motifs; it creates
its own story, characters, and the forces behind them. Pickman's Muse
focuses on an emotionally lost artist who unconsciously finds his way
to obsession, murder, and lies.


Robert Pickman (Walz) is a recluse, focusing on his art. Lately
though, he can't help feeling like there is something missing even
with this one thing that he completely devotes himself to. He visits a
therapist, and is suffering from depression to an extent; unable to
enjoy things in life that seem to come to other so easily to others.
Pickman is far behind on his paintings. His costumers are waiting on
him, but he just can't get himself to paint. Suddenly one night he
finds a newfound inspiration. Voices whisper to him, putting images in
his head. Pickman paints these images that others are completely
horrified and sickened by. This new muse gives him inspiration --
Pickman can't help but listen.

When Pickman turns his work in, he is told that it looks like a Goodie
Hines copycat. Pickman has never even heard of Goodie Hines though. He
finds out that Goodie is a famed artist who was obsessed with the same
images. Pickman's doctor, Dr. Dexter (McNicholas), becomes very
concerned with the resemblance between the two. Their drawings match
up exactly, as if one was traced from the other. Goodie was one of Dr.
Dexter's failed patients who ended up going crazy. Now a piece of him
seems to have resurfaced in Pickman and he sets out to destroy this at
all costs.

Barret Walz really stood out as Robert Pickman, winning the Chicago
Horror Film Festival's award for best actor. He displays a wide range
of emotions when he is being influenced by his muse. In some scenes he
seems completely composed in a trance like state. Other times he seems
shocked and horrified with himself, surprised that he is even capable
of the things he is doing and burdened by trying to keep it all a
secret. Tom Lodewyk also did an incredible job bringing out the very
creepy, Goodie Hines. His insanity is overpowering, yet he still has a
hold on his sanity. It's the only thing he cares for anymore, there is
such a desperation for even a pen; anything that will let him
translate the images flying around in his head. This overwhelming need
and the unconventionally ghastly illustrations that Goodie longs to
get out creates quite a thrilling character. Maurice McNicholas does a
decent job as Dr. Dexter, but he doesn't come off quite as genuine or
believable in his performance as Walz and Lodewyk were.

Pickman's Muse takes it's time with the pacing, but it works. It has a
heavy focus on the psychological element. This slower pacing gives
time to establish Pickman as a dissatisfied and absent state while
building the exploration of morbid inspiration and the murderous
capabilities he holds within himself. It would have been nice if we
would have been shown some of the more atrocious paintings that were
equated with the devil himself. On the other hand, it would be hard to
create something like this that met the expectations set by the
context the paintings were in. The parallels between Pickman and
Goodie Hines are filled with interesting material, and subtext. For
me, the storyline with Dr. Dexter trying to stop Pickman didn't
capture my interest quite as well. Still, I can see its intent to add
a bit of tension and escalate the climax. The transitions Pickman goes
through are really what make the film so captivating. It offers the
question of whether he is doing this for the sake of art, sanity, or
simply out of weakness and the inability to ignore the voices.

Pickman's Muse was made on a $5,000 budget, which is completely
astounding. The production values are pretty solid, the locations and
sets are atmospheric, and realistic; and the soundtrack really helps
set the tone. Including an actual abandoned church really adds to the
creepiness and mystery that the image of the church represents.
Shooting for the film lasted over 2 years and it is clear that it has
been a passion project of Cappelletto's for some time, which shows in
the film.

- Kelsey Zukowski

From Faust668 at msn.com  Mon Oct 19 15:50:17 2009
From: Faust668 at msn.com (Jerry Saravia)
Date: Mon Oct 19 15:50:19 2009
Subject: Retrospective: The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
Message-ID: <2cd70bd2-113c-4957-a16d-dc4f1a7fce80@o36g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>

THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1940)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
RATING: Three stars and a half

I remember seeing "The Thief of Bagdad" when I was a kid and I
marvelled at the sights of a magic carpet, a giant 70-foot genie, the
eyes of Jaffar, the flying mechanical horse, and essentially the
colorful world of an Arabian Nights fantasy brought to life. Seeing it
so many years later (and mistakenly thinking that the genie was a blue-
skinned one), "The Thief of Bagdad" is a marvelous feast for the eyes
and the ears yet and one that must be savored, yet some casting and
minor editing in the first quarter mark might have helped.

King Ahmad (John Justin) has become a blind man with a dog who is seen
peddling in the streets. Prince Jaffar (Conrad Veidt) has blinded
Ahmad yet needs his help in awakening the princess Jaffar hopes to
marry, known simply as the Princess (June Duprez). King Ahmad obliges
and tells Jaffar's enslaved women of how he became blind and how the
dog was once Abu (Sabu), the prince of thieves belonging to a family
of thieves. Their adventures involved everything one loves seeing in a
fantasy, including tidal waves, magic carpet rides, the giant flying
genie (Rex Ingram) who can only grant three wishes, last-minute rescue
attempts including saving someone from a beheading, a goddess with six
arms, a Tibetan temple that contains the All-Seeing-Eye in ruby form
and a series of booby traps, the shadow cast on the wall of Jaffar
acting independently as Jaffar works his evil magic, and much more.

My major quibble is the opening exposition which drags the action a
little. I confess that I wanted to see the sense of magic and wonder I
recall seeing in my youth, and my anxiety kept wanting the tale to get
started. I do not mind seeing Jaffar and those penetrating eyes, but
when he confesses his love for the princess, I got a little bored. It
could be that June Duprez is too anemic on screen (Vivien Leigh was
originally cast but had to drop out due to a little film called "Gone
With the Wind." Imagine how much more striking those scenes would've
been with Leigh). The introduction to King Ahmad as played by Justin
also strikes me as off-kilter - Justin has little charisma and is
about as animated as a cold bowl of soup. Duprez and Justin bring the
movie to a slight halt whenever they appear.

"The Thief of Badgad" was originally made in 1924 in a delightful film
with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. with Fairbanks playing the thief and a
prince as a composite (and the one version I saw had the aptly used
"Scheherazade" music by Rimsky-Korsakov). This version was produced by
Hungarian producer Alexander Korda and had almost six directors
involved, including Michael Powell, Ludwig Berger, William Cameron
Menzies and even Korda himself took the reins. Normally this would
spell a production in trouble but the results are far better than
expected.

But when we get to finally see Sabu on screen as Abu (he is changed
into a dog by Jaffar as we see in the opening), the screen becomes
electric and tantalizing. I just marvel at Abu's escape from street
vendors as he steals cooked fish and jumps up and down rooftops with
the greatest of ease, or the way he tricks the genie to get back in
his bottle. Sabu brings a sense of joy and enthusiasm to the role -
you just know he is ready to burst into action. So with Sabu and the
penetrating, angry eyes of Jaffar and the witty Rex Ingram as the
laughing genie whose laugh is so powerful that inside a canyon it can
break down rock formations, I was hooked and swept away by the grandly
entertaining and sheer awesome spectacle of "The Thief of Bagdad."

For more reviews, check out JERRY AT THE MOVIES at:
http://www.geocities.com/faustus_08520/Jerry_at_the_Movies.html

BIO on the author of this page at:
http://www.geocities.com/faustus_08520/index.html

Email me at Faust668@msn.com or at faustus_08520@yahoo.com

From mleeper at optonline.net  Mon Oct 19 20:55:37 2009
From: mleeper at optonline.net (Mark R. Leeper)
Date: Mon Oct 19 20:55:40 2009
Subject: Review: Where the Wild Things Are (2009)
Message-ID: <op.u12custhy83cp7@mail-hub.optonline.net>

                    WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: A boy with emotional problems finds himself
     on an island with large fluffy animal people.  Spike
     Jonze co-writes and directs this adaptation of the
     popular 1963 children's book.  While the book works
     fine for the younger set, the film tries to be too
     much an Alice-in-Wonderland-class story for all ages,
     but it rarely works for both young and old at the
     same time.  Rating: high 0 (-4 to +4) or 5/10

The Caldecott Medal Winning children's book WHERE THE WILD THINGS
ARE by Maurice Sendak is thirty-seven pages and only 338 words.
This does not give very material to base a feature-length film
upon.  Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers have fleshed it out into a
screenplay for a live action adaptation.  That required a lot of
invention on their part and the result does not entirely work.

Max (played by Max Records) is a boy with problems.  He seems to
have no friends and has a very short fuse.  Only his mother seems
to like him and then not all the time.  He is reduced to
threatening fences to support his sense of being someone.  When his
older sister's friends destroy his igloo he tracks snow into her
room and jumps on her bed.  Finally his anger boils over and he
puts on his animal pajamas and runs away from home.  Taking a small
boat and sailing for open water he finds himself swept to a magic
island inhabited by large animal people.  He tells them that he is
a king and they believe him and let him rule them.

As their king Max has all sorts of exciting plans for his people
starting with the building of a mighty fortress.  Unfortunately, in
the animals he sees many of his own attitudes.  Animal people with
his own faults ruin the wonderful kingdom he had planned.

In some ways this film is a throwback to the TV show
"H. R. Pufnstuf".  As with that show it was decided that a film or
movie could compete with animation by putting actors in cartoon-
like costumes.  It would not surprise me to find out that some
places hand puppets were used, but for the most part the animal
people are people in suits that had mechanical controls to provide
facial expression.  The result has gotten a whole lot better since
the days of "H. R. Pufnstuf", but so has the animation competition.
The live-action renderings really capture the images created by
Sendak, and children may well enjoy the visuals created.  But the
enchantment wears off.  I saw the film in a full Sunday afternoon
crowd.  Some of the older children might have been enjoying the
film but the five-year-olds in the crowd were restless.  It is not
clear that even the older children would have known what to make of
lines like "happiness is not the best way to be happy."  (Come to
think of it, I am not sure I get it.)

In addition, the film has a high level of cartoonish violence.
Nobody is seriously hurt more than a boo-boo.  But there is a fair
amount of heavy animal roughhousing.  One cannot count on a whole
lot of emotion continuity in this film.  Characters who do not like
each other in one scene may be friends in the next sequence.  Other
sorts of continuity are missing also.  We have the ground covered
with snow in one sequence and without much feel for passage of time
the snow seems to have entirely gone away the next time we look.

There are several familiar voices for characters.  The animal-man
closest to Max is Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini).  Catherine
O'Hara voices the character of Judith.  Chris Cooper does Carol's
best friend, the birdman Douglas.  Forest Whitaker takes the role
of Ira.  With top-notch actors like that one would expect
characters that the viewer can come away feeling he knows.  Sadly
that is not the case here.  Human-animals remain cryptic.  They
talk like normal people, but not so that one can feel he knows any
of them.  Their lead is Carol who seems like a spoiled child.  But
we don't know him much better than that.  It may have been a
mistake for Jonze to direct his own screenplay.  He knows what
emotions he wanted the characters to be conveying, but he probably
is not seeing the result as an outsider and realizing that they are
just not connecting with the viewer.

This is a story that meanders and loses much of its audience, young
and old, but perhaps not in the same places.  I rate WHERE THE WILD
THINGS ARE a high 0 on the -4 to +4 scale or 5/10.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0386117/>

What others are saying:
<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/where_the_wild_things_are/>


					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper@optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper

From mleeper at optonline.net  Wed Oct 21 19:37:58 2009
From: mleeper at optonline.net (Mark R. Leeper)
Date: Wed Oct 21 19:38:01 2009
Subject: Review: The Stoning of Soraya M (2008)
Message-ID: <op.u13xzuj0y83cp7@mail-hub.optonline.net>

                     THE STONING OF SORAYA M
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: The harrowing true story from Iran.  An
     Iranian woman became "inconvenient" for her husband
     who wants to trade her for a younger wife.  He frames
     her for adultery, connives to have her found guilty
     and sentenced to death, and participates in her
     execution.  We see the stoning in horrific detail.
     The story is simple and compelling and the title
     leaves no doubt where the story is going.  This is a
     powerful film for those willing to see its extreme
     violence.  Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4) or 8/10

Soraya Manutchehri was an Iranian woman who was married at age 13
to a petty thug, Ghorban-Ali seven years her senior.  In 1986,
after twenty-two hellish years of beatings and infidelity from her
husband he wanted to take a younger wife.  He could not support two
wives so he decided he had to be rid of the first wife.  He frames
Soraya for adultery with the help of a corrupt local mullah.  As
Islamic law was practiced at that time the burden of proof was on
her to prove her innocence and with false witness testimony against
her she had no chance.  It is an easy matter to have her found
guilty.  Then, pulling few punches, the film shows graphically an
execution by stoning.

The film is told mostly in flashback the day after the execution.
The mountain village, Kupayeh, is visited by a journalist in need
of a car repair.  He is played by James Caviezel, who was similarly
martyred in THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST.  A woman wants to talk to
him, though others tell him she is mad.  This is Zahra, (Shohreh
Aghdashloo of HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG), the aunt of Soraya M (Mozhan
Marnoand) who tells him the story behind the stoning.

It would be easy to identify the husband Ali (Navid Negahban) as
the villain of the piece, but there is more than enough fault to go
around.  One judge displays a little conscience, but allows himself
to be overruled.  He is the only man in the village who is shown to
have any objections to the proceedings.  On the other hand when the
village of men go to rock-throwing only one woman in the crowd
seems to be enthusiastic about the killing.

The film has many images that may seem strange to an American
audience.  The mountain village of stone buildings is an odd
juxtaposition with the modern sports car that Soraya's husband Ali
drives around to impress his intended new wife.

Though the film is mostly in Persian, it is actually an American
film.  Cyrus Nowrasteh directs a screenplay he co-authored with his
wife Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh from the book by French journalist
Freidoune Sahebjam.  The film they have made is strongly affecting
with the stoning sequence lasting twenty minutes all by itself.
The director is pulling no punches.  This film grabs the emotions
of the viewer, particularly anger and pity.  But the film is on a
strong subject.  If the viewer is not angered by the situation the
film has not done its job.  Perhaps not wanting to leave on just
the note of the martyrdom there is about ten minutes after the
stoning sequence with a little action that might seem to be anti-
climax.

The fact that there was one sociopath in the country, Soraya's
husband, is not much of an indictment against anyone but him.  But
the fact that he could so easily get Islamic Fundamentalism to
become his accomplice raises very disturbing questions.  The film
is a warning about what can happen when a people delegates their
private consciences to someone else's interpretation of a book.
Perhaps the most important resource that any community has is their
collective private conscience.  When people abandon it for promised
rewards in the afterlife, the result is disaster.  I rate THE
STONING OF SORAYA M a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 8/10.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1277737/>

What others are saying:
<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/stoning_of_soraya_m/>

A discussion of the issues of this film:
<http://tinyurl.com/oak4rr>


					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper@optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper

From Faust668 at msn.com  Wed Oct 21 19:39:19 2009
From: Faust668 at msn.com (Jerry Saravia)
Date: Wed Oct 21 19:39:21 2009
Subject: Review: Religulous (2008)
Message-ID: <290fe56b-8c45-4457-b939-35d66fde3dc3@g1g2000vbr.googlegroups.com>

RELIGULOUS (2008)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
RATING: Three stars

Bill Maher is a radical leftist comedian who has taken his radical
political views quite far on his vastly entertaining show, "Real Time
with Bill Maher." Religion is a hot-button issue for him, mainly
because he thinks it is silly for people to believe in a space god. I
am not sure if religion is a concept he is willing to invest more
highly in - he treats it as a joke and thinks people are stupid if
they believe. He is an aggressive atheist but maybe not aggressive
enough. I have a feeling that is why he made "Religulous," a funny,
observant and very uneven documentary. Uneven because Bill Maher has a
habit of not listening closely enough and interrupting those whom he
interviews.

Bill Maher begins the global journey in an effort to understand
religion and why many believe in God. He travels to a North Carolina
truck stop chapel where one of the truckers walks out in disgust at
Maher's comments. Another trucker comments on being a former Satanist
priest (!) who found God. We also get a Puerto Rican named Jose Luis
de Jesus Miranda, who believes he is the Second Coming of Christ
largely due to a bloodline of descendants from Jesus Christ. In
addition, we get an actor playing Jesus at a Florida Biblical
amusement park, which includes a whipping of a bloodied Christ
carrying the cross accompanied by applause from the audience; ex-
Mormons questioning Joseph Smith as a leader; an Amsterdam club where
marijuana is smoked but not as a sacrament (this segment confused me
but who knows, they were all probably high); a gay Muslim bar; a far
too short segment on the late film director Theo Van Gogh who made a
film that offended Muslims and was killed for it; a rabbi who denies
the Holocaust, and so much more. Interspersed throughout the film are
clips from old Jesus flicks and George C. Scott as Abraham in the
hysterical John Huston film, "The Bible" (there is also a funny clip
from "Superbad.")

Most of "Religulous" is very funny but I can't say it is all sharply
observed or on-target. The truck stop chapel footage could've been
better served had it been towards the end. Some segments deserve more
focus, particularly the ex-Mormon bit, the comparison between Abraham
sacrificing his son for God to a recent murder of five children by
their mother ("God told me to do it"), more scenes of Bill Maher's
late mother and her sharing in her son's concept of doubt, and the
concept of original sin and why Jesus Miranda believes sinning no
longer exists (that was a howler).

What does work is when Bill Maher asks truly valid questions. Why does
the Old Testament not talk about the virgin birth? Why no written text
exists on Jesus's teenage years? Why a certain preacher believes that
Jesus was a rich man and why he can't get that old camel and the
needle quote correct? I also liked Maher's observations on miracles
and when rain is simply rain. Also interesting is seeing the area of
Meggido and how it seems an unlikely location for the end of days.

As I said, "Religulous" is damn funny stuff and invigorating and
illuminating. But it needed sharper questions from Maher about the
validity of religion and how and why it shapes people's lives,
particularly when the concept of sin is often omitted. Maybe it scares
Bill to get too deep or maybe he had already made up his mind about
religion before he even made the film.


For more reviews, check out JERRY AT THE MOVIES at:
http://www.geocities.com/faustus_08520/Jerry_at_the_Movies.html

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From Faust668 at msn.com  Wed Oct 21 19:40:43 2009
From: Faust668 at msn.com (Jerry Saravia)
Date: Wed Oct 21 19:40:45 2009
Subject: Review: The Visitor (2007)
Message-ID: <7b2a8a6f-8208-46e7-9bd4-0b0b38aeaa4e@k26g2000vbp.googlegroups.com>

THE VISITOR (2007)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
RATING: Four stars

Richard Jenkins is one of those character actors who appears and
spices things up, and does it with a sly wink, an eyebrow lift  or a
chuckle to get his point across, usually followed by a nonplussed,
deadpan look. He has appeared in "Wolf," "Flirting With Disaster,"
"Burn After Reading," amongst many other films. "The Visitor" is
undeniable proof that this actor deserves more leading roles,
especially in a film that is at once as profound and moving as
anything you are likely to see. I make that latter statement often but
this film really strikes a chord.

Jenkins plays Walter, an unhappy global economics professor living in
Connecticut. He is so unhappy that he can't play the piano despite
getting piano lessons (his late wife was a piano player). He tries to
connect to something but he can't. He hasn't written a book in ages
and is hesitant to attend a New York conference on a book he barely co-
authored. Walter hesitantly goes to New York City and finds his
apartment there is occupied by strangers, namely Tarek (Haaz Sleiman)
and Zainab (Danai Gurira). Tarek is an enthusiastic Syrian drum player
and Zainab is an African woman who sells handmade and handcrafted
jewelry. Both Tarek and Zainab are illegal immigrants and, in a lesser
film, Walter might have called the INS and had them deported just
before learning the errors of his ways and becoming a changed man.
Walter does change but in ways that are shown with subtlety and
nuance, not outright naked emotions like crying crocodile tears or
screaming at the top of his lungs. Walter lets Tareq and Zainab stay
in his two-bedroom apartment, allows Tarek to practice the drums in
his underwear, and in short allows these people to occupy his
apartment so that he can feel attached to someone again.

Through the course of "The Visitor," Walter learns to play the drums
(a way of replacing his passionless piano playing and his obscure
past) and begins the first few steps to express whatever he feels that
he has been hiding from. He also meets, through an unusual set of
circumstances, Tarek's mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass), whom he takes to
the opera to see The Phantom of the Opera, and somehow relates and
connects to her. Even Zainab warms up to Walter over time. Some
reviewers have given away the second half of the film but it would be
a disservice to reveal it here simply because it is not half as
important as seeing the small nuances of change occuring in Walter.

"The Visitor" is briskly and economically directed by Thomas McCarthy,
who had a wonderful debut with the equally effective "The Station
Agent." In many ways, "The Visitor" resembles "The Station Agent" in
its overall structure of how a person comes out of nowhere and makes a
difference in people's lives by listening to and appreciating them. In
"Station Agent," it was Peter Dinklage as a retail worker at a toy
train shop who inherited a small train station and met two different
characters, a coffee wagon owner and a divorced woman. The tone is
also the same in "The Visitor" and the movie's sense of quiet invokes
not despair but a sense of hope since it strongly builds its intimacy
with the characters.

If "The Visitor" might seem like another tale of a middle-class white
man who gets his groove back, it is only on the surface. Jenkins
brings something more full-bodied and all-encompassing to Walter - he
shows that the man has a heart but it takes a while to warm it up.
Jenkins plays Walter as a detached man but not a cold or unfeeling
detached man, rather someone who is doing what he can to help others
in need. The implication seems to be that Walter is trying not to be
sulky and is willing to move past his wife's death. His body language
and gestures say much more than any emoting. One of the best scenes in
the film is a small one to savor. It involves a dinner between Mouna
and Walter and Mouna asks him about the process of writing. He
responds rather harshly in tone by telling her that the writing
process can't be explained to someone who isn't a writer. After making
the comment, he apologizes. Small, effective, simple. That sums up
"The Visitor."

For more reviews, check out JERRY AT THE MOVIES at:
http://www.geocities.com/faustus_08520/Jerry_at_the_Movies.html

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From Faust668 at msn.com  Wed Oct 21 19:42:15 2009
From: Faust668 at msn.com (Jerry Saravia)
Date: Wed Oct 21 19:42:17 2009
Subject: Review: Labor Pains (2008)
Message-ID: <14882e7f-8dcd-4ddc-80b4-7e23d2085b6d@g23g2000vbr.googlegroups.com>

LABOR PAINS (2008)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
RATING: Two stars

Lindsay Lohan's career is on a definite slump. Rumor had it that she
was considered for a role in a remake of "Rosemary's Baby"! That was
quickly abolished in favor of a different kind of baby movie called
"Labor Pains." Not the worst of its kind and hardly the best, and
Lindsay Lohan almost saves it, but then she should not have to carry a
by-the-numbers flick all by her lonesome.

Lohan is Thea, an inefficient secretary at a publishing company who
almost loses her job until she claims she is pregnant! Of course, she
isn't really pregnant but she lies to keep her job. I would assume her
employer (Chris Parnell, Dr. Spaceman to the rest of you) would see
through her fake smiles and fake sincerity (and fake bulging belly)
but I guess I am wrong. Before long, Thea falls for her temporary
boss, Nick (Luke Kirby), while Parnell is on leave for his sick puppy
in Bethesda (that little plot point could've used more exposure). And
wouldn't you know that Thea turns out to be as efficient as an
associate editor with her own office as she was a lowly secretary, to
the point that she helps to promote a pregnancy book that focuses on
the downside of pregnancy. This is all thanks to the smitten Nick. Oh,
and I did leave out Thea's sister who lives with Thea and cuts class
to be with her boyfriend yet she is dismayed when she discovers Thea's
lies, to the point of tearing the fake pregnancy pouch from Thea's
belly! And why does Thea's sister look like a more mature Britney
Spears? Just a thought.

"Labor Pains" starts off too slowly and only recovers somewhere around
the three-quarter mark. Yet there is nothing here that can't be
anticipated and it yields few surprises. Only Lohan manages to make
you care for her character, which is fitting yet not enough. It is
nice seeing Cheryl Hines as Thea's best friend but even she yields
little surprise. The director Lara Shapiro doesn't engineer a fast-
paced, rollicking ride of a comedy, like the 30's and 40's snappier
paced "The Philadelphia Story" or any Hawksian comedy where the
dialogue was delivered like a roaring engine that never let up. Even
the 1980 counterparts such as "Baby Boom" and "Three Men and a Baby"
had more rhythm. This movie simply takes too long to get anywhere, and
drags along labored performances and a labored screenplay, no pun
intended. This should have madcap written all over it.

As I mentioned before, I enjoy watching Lindsay Lohan and she has
ample charm and good comic timing, when she is allowed to use it. But
she needs better writers and directors or else she'll be stuck in
romantic comedy mode forever. I see one of her future projects is
"Machete" by Robert Rodriguez. Let's hope that breaks the spell of her
most unfortunately titled picture, "Just My Luck."


For more reviews, check out JERRY AT THE MOVIES at:
http://www.geocities.com/faustus_08520/Jerry_at_the_Movies.html

BIO on the author of this page at:
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From Faust668 at msn.com  Wed Oct 21 19:45:02 2009
From: Faust668 at msn.com (Jerry Saravia)
Date: Wed Oct 21 19:45:04 2009
Subject: Review: Burn After Reading (2008)
Message-ID: <45e10977-e31f-4b4d-8af9-d4a63ac069db@p20g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>

BURN AFTER READING (2008)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
RATING: Three stars

How do I review the Coens latest wacky comedy? Tough to say except
that it is blazingly original and wacky and schizophrenic and,
occasionally, hilarious and spectacularly uneven. You know, the usual
brand of Coens humor.

John Malkovich is CIA analyst Osborne Cox, who is beyond upset that
his services are no longer required due to rampant drunkeness. He is
unhappily married to Katie (Tilda Swinton), who is having an affair
with one of the strangest Coens characters ever, Harry Pfarrer (George
Clooney), a married and paranoid federal marshal who has a
predilection for dildos! Harry navigates an online dating service
where he meets Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), who works at a gym
called Hardbodies. It is there where the foolhardy and foolish Chad
Feldheimer (the hilarious and truly zonked-out Brad Pitt) comes upon a
computer disk that supposedly contains CIA secrets ("It is s**t and
more s**t.") Somehow all this leads to the irascible Osbourne Cox, who
is trying to write his memoirs, Cox's CIA boss (J.K. Simmons) who
hopes to make sense of all this, Pfarrer's paranoia thinking he is
being followed, and some business revolving around Litzke's planned
plastic surgery and the alleged CIA disk being sold to the Russian
Embassy.

On the Coens scale of pure frenetic idiocy, this is not as much fun as
"The Big Lebowski" but it is far superior to "Hudsucker Proxy" and
"Intolerable Cruelty." All the actors in "Burn After Reading" pretty
much overact and do it as well as you can imagine. Brad Pitt comes off
best as the most idiotic and memorable character in the Coens
universe, salivating every syllable of the Coens language to the nth
degree. Clooney is rather creepy in this film, playing a very
mysterious character to say the least. McDormand is always fun to
watch as is the underrated Richard Jenkins, the manager of Hardbodies
who doesn't like espionage. Malkovich gives the F-bombs a special kind
of lunacy with his temperamental diction - you swear he is saying the
words as if they were written by Shakespeare. Brilliant, I say.

"Burn After Reading" is manic, riotously funny and rather empty. It is
full of calories but it pretty much dissolves after its abrupt ending
and you wonder, what the heck was that all about? Why am I still
hungry after it is over? I love jokey, harebrained movies like this,
which are hardly a dime a dozen, but I am not sure what to take away
from it. Just like its equally jocose cousin, "The Big Lebowski," that
movie also ended before it should have. I guess the best way I can
describe it is like this: "Big Lebowski" was about a stained rug that
managed to involve bowling alleys, cremation, violent Vietnam Vets,
mixed identities and Yma Sumac. "Burn After Reading" is about a CIA
computer disk that involves gyms, plastic surgery, dildo contraptions,
unfortunate encounters, paranoia and some other s**t. It is good s**t
but don't ask me to analyze this s**t.


For more reviews, check out JERRY AT THE MOVIES at:
http://www.geocities.com/faustus_08520/Jerry_at_the_Movies.html

BIO on the author of this page at:
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From Faust668 at msn.com  Wed Oct 21 19:45:49 2009
From: Faust668 at msn.com (Jerry Saravia)
Date: Wed Oct 21 19:45:51 2009
Subject: Retrospective: World Trade Center (2006)
Message-ID: <687d311f-0b04-4cec-8698-0088dd0a7728@m13g2000vbf.googlegroups.com>

WORLD TRADE CENTER (2006)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
RATING: Three stars and a half

Oliver Stone is known for his fire and brimstone approach to
filmmaking where every point is made with a hammer yet loaded with an
emotional ferocity. His best films ("Platoon," "Born on the 4th of
July," "JFK," et al) pop with such exuberance and emotional power that
they become more than films - they are vivid portraits of calamitous
events painted with a human face. "World Trade Center" is definitely a
powerful film but its approach is not as incendiary or full of layered
images upon images in the typical Stone style post"JFK." This time,
Stone takes a backseat to visual and aural overload because this
survival story doesn't need it.

Set on the early morning hours of 9/11/01, we follow two Port
Authority cops, Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) and John McLoughlin
(Nicolas Cage, at his restrained best), as they prepare their daily
routine of awaking in the wee hours of the morning and traveling from
Long Island, NY and New Jersey to Manhattan. Jimeno is the average cop
on the lookout for a missing person. McLoughlin is the sergeant who
commandeers his unit, and has kept a close eye on the World Trade
Center since the infamous 1993 bombing. Of course, he has never dealt
with the enormity of the situation at hand - two planes have flown
into the World Trade Center. A major rescue mission is at hand but how
on earth can they rescue people when the towers implode and crumble to
dust while they are in the WTC lobby? Both Jimeno and his partner and
friend, Dominick Pezzulo (Jay Hernandez), are stuck with McLoughlin
under the rubble of smoke and debris and the occasional fireball.
Pezzulo is eventually crushed to death, leaving only Jimeno and
McLoughlin to talk to each other about their families so they don't
fall asleep and possibly die (keep the brain active, as they say, so
you don't fall into a coma).

Oliver Stone has not made a conspiracy film about 9/11, so don't go
expecting a paranoid, political twist on modern events on the order of
Stone's "JFK" or "Nixon." Stone has crafted something here that is
akin to "Platoon" and "Salvador" in its individual story of survival.
The difference, in the case with this film, is that it is an
apolitical story of two protagonists who serve to protect and are in
dire need of protection from certain death. Stone and writer Andrea
Berloff also evoke the complications of almost losing someone on that
dreadful day through the protagonists' wives. Jimeno's loving pregnant
wife (astutely and honestly played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) is an
emotional wreck who is waiting for the call that says Jimeno is alive
and has been rescued. McLoughlin's wife (exceedingly well-played by
Maria Bello, sporting striking blue eyes) tries to distance herself
from the catastrophe, hoping McLoughlin is alive yet realizing that
their love of each other might have soured prior to 9/11.

"World Trade Center" is essentially a story of strength and survival
in the most dire and inhumane of catastrophes. It doesn't exploit the
9/11 tragedy but merely embodies it, as seen through the eyes of two
heroic cops who did their damnedest to help others. The scenes of
Jimeno and McLoughlin trapped in the rubble are about as intense as
you might expect in an Oliver Stone film (despite discussions on "G.I.
Jane" and a vision of Jesus, which the actual Jimeno saw). And also as
expected, the scenes between the wives and their families glued to the
TV screens, waiting to hear good news, are emotionally devastating. In
fact, Bello and Gyllenhaal have scenes of such unparalleled power that
you will grow more than misty-eyed - they are affecting in such a deep
way as to make you remember how the day affected just about everyone.

I am a fan of Ollie Stone's critical dissent on politics but, this
time, I can say I am glad he found the nerve to tell a simple survival
story through the prism of 9/11. Some say Stone may have lost his
touch and cleaned up his paranoiac fervor. Not so. How many filmmakers
would dare to make a film about 9/11? Exactly.

For more reviews, check out JERRY AT THE MOVIES at:
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From Faust668 at msn.com  Wed Oct 21 19:46:47 2009
From: Faust668 at msn.com (Jerry Saravia)
Date: Wed Oct 21 19:46:49 2009
Subject: Retrospective: Nickelodeon (1976)
Message-ID: <32e37979-59ac-4330-8f4e-dfff60af1ce1@o13g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>

NICKELODEON (1976)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
RATING: Two stars

"Nickelodeon" looks and feels like a warmed-over nostalgia piece. It
is suffused with a sepia-toned glow and it reminds us of a different
time and place when movies were just mere entertainments you could
watch for a nickle. Peter Bogdanovich, a master craftsman, is the
right director for this type of film, but the spirit and joy are
missing.

Set in the 1910's, Ryan O'Neal is Leo Harrigan, an attorney who is
close to losing a case involving assault. He somehow stumbles into a
movie producer (Brian Keith) who urges him to write a film about a
Texas Ranger (how this happens is part of the fun of the movie's few
contrivances). After working in the film industry for many years,
O'Neal turns from writer to director. Over some unfortunate mishaps
(some of which are funny), O'Neal's luggage gets switched with a movie
stuntman and horse rider's luggage, Buck Greenway (Burt Reynolds), and
both men vie for the same breathless beauty, Kathleen Cooke (Jane
Hitchcock) who has one pratfall after another because she is
nearsighted. Meanwhile, slasptick ensues and we get a klansman on
stage that gets cheers from the audience (times have changed); a tough
little girl with a rattlesnake (Tatum O'Neal); more misplaced luggage
scenes; the premiere of D. W. Griffith's notorious "Birth of a
Nation"; actors putting on blackface; and not a heck of a lot more.

"Nickelodeon" is mostly aimless and inert, despite a game cast that
includes John Ritter and Stella Stevens. Burt Reynolds comes off best,
showing ample Southern charm that illustrates what a colorful
character actor he might have become. Ryan O'Neal is so transparent
that you could throw him through a sieve and he'd still be intact.
Tatum O'Neal mostly recedes in the background, occasionally yelling so
we know she is there. And Jane Hitchcock is radiant to look at but the
underwritten screenplay makes her dissolve before the end credits.

Bogdanovich has misdirected "Nickelodeon," shifting tone and rhythm
without any regards to the thin story involving patents, the first
"real war in movies." There is one clever long take where we see
several tents strung together with a different movie made in each one.
It is such a good scene that I'd almost recommend it, but it is hardly
enough.


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From Tristan_White at rocketmail.com  Fri Oct 23 12:51:32 2009
From: Tristan_White at rocketmail.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Trist=E1n_White?=)
Date: Fri Oct 23 12:51:35 2009
Subject: Review: The White Ribbon (2009)
Message-ID: <a8f98a2a-65db-401c-9187-95c3e7bc318e@f10g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>

THE WHITE RIBBON  ("Das wei?e Band)
Directed by: Michael Haneke

Review by:  Trist?n Harvey E. White

Rating: (0 to *****):    *****  (five stars)


Last night, London audiences were treated to the gala screening of the
Palme d'Or winner at Cannes this year, THE WHITE RIBBON, Michael
Haneke's first film since his remake of Funny Games a couple of years
ago.

It really is a treat. Occasionally reminiscent of Carl Theodor
Dreyer's wonderful 1955 film ORDET, this film is shot in beautifully
crisp black and white, a decision that, according to Haneke himself in
last night's Q&A session, the producers, distributors and "TV people"
were initially unsure about. However, Haneke always knew that this
film simply had to be in B&W... not least because the film is based in
the early 1910s, a distant period we ourselves could never visualise
in colour.

Like Britain's own Michael Winterbottom (whose films have recently
been in languages as diverse as Persian, Pashtu and Serbo-Croat),
Haneke appears to have the knack to be able to direct in any genre and
in any language, which is remarkable. Before THE WHITE RIBBON, we had
FUNNY GAMES U.S. in English, CACH?  and LA PIANISTE in French, etc.
Haneke's own ability in English is somewhat impaired, last night
needing an interpreter for the Q&A session. THE WHITE RIBBON is in
Haneke's native German (he himself is from Austria), and the intimacy
and closeness with his characters is much more palpable than in some
of his previous films, right from the opening scene where a child is
sobbing on the staircase, crying not over his father (who is in
hospital following a riding accident) but, we discover, over the fate
of the horse; meanwhile, big sister tries to hold back her tears. In a
later scene, the pastor's wife is in semi-darkness, cutting out white
ribbon to be used to humiliate her children; her eyes are moist, but
she is too austere and too ashamed to let them show in front of her
totalitarian husband. Although I cannot be sure, I would be surprised
if Haneke would have been able to squeeze out such amazing acting from
these mainly unknown actors had he been working with an English-
speaking cast.

This is a film about a small village in the early 1900s, before the
First World War. The Baron is the landowner who employs at least half
of the villagers. The villagers need the work but secretly despise the
Baron. "Accidents" begin to happen, a child is abducted, the peasants
rebel, there's going to be a World War soon.....

Hang on, have I not just described 1900 - NOVECENTO, by Bernardo
Bertolucci?

I have indeed. And in this way, the two films have an identical
premise. However, where they are miles apart is in the characteristics
of the villagers. Other than the fact that NOVECENTO is a longer film
(5hrs 25 mins) and describes a longer period (over forty years,
compared to two or three years between 1911 and 1914 in Germany),
NOVECENTO has much more rapport between the two social classes, thanks
to the friendship between Alfredo (De Niro) and Olmo (Depardieu). It
is also a magnificent paean to Communism and the workers' movement.
However, THE WHITE RIBBON is completely the opposite in this way.
Rather than becoming Communists, we see clues as to how these German
children of 1911 will, some twenty years later, become either (a)
Nazis or (b) happy to be ruled by Nazis. It is, in a way, a pretext
for (rather than an paean to) right-wing fascism.

The fact that two similar premises and environs and social structures
can create two political mindsets that are so completely different
speaks volumes about Germany, and I think this is what Haneke is
getting at, although Haneke will never entirely tell you what he is
getting at: he likes people to think, to work things out for
themselves. As with CACH?, some of the storylines are never explained,
but this really does not matter. THE WHITE RIBBON is a superb story,
and any attempt to explain too much of the story in the d?nouement
would be making life too easy for the viewer. Haneke himself has gone
on record in a recent article for Der Spiegel to say that he likes his
viewers to feel as though they have been raped at the end of a movie.
In fact, as the audience at last night's Gala gave the film and its
director an ovation as the credits rolled up, we ended up with more
questions than answers, and all the more enriched from it. Who cares
if not all our questions are answered? How often are they answered in
real life?

The only question we have kind of had answered for us are about why
Germans acted like they did in the 1930s as Hitler rose to power. Why
they were so at ease with the Nazi totalitarian regime. Why they
became Nazis themselves. Here we see the kids interrogated by police,
kids punched and caned by their authoritarian parents, physical and in
one case even sexual abuse. We see the effect it has on their kids,
the cruelty begin to rub off, the violence beginning to be evident. In
one case, a young girl butchers her father's budgerigar with a pair of
scissors. In another, a child with Down syndrome, Karli, is tortured
by unseen perpetrators - although it is strongly hinted that they are
probably the other children in the village. This marginalisation of
the village "idiot" may seem incidental, but when we consider the
Nazi's later interpretation of Eugenics, we see in this scene a
macabre prognostication of the future.

Could this finally be Haneke's year? Surely THE WHITE RIBBON will be
nominated for a foreign language Oscar (Germany have thankfully
submitted this film as the German representative - at least one
country appears to have got it right, following Spain's decision not
to send BROKEN EMBRACES and Greece's even more bizarre decision not to
send this year's Un Certain R?gard winner DOGTOOTH, another film to
receive rave reviews at this year's London Film Festival and to which
we were treated last week).

Haneke surely deserves it, having been cruelly disqualified from
presenting CACH? in 2005 because, like Italy's PRIVATE the year
before, it was using a language that was not native to the nominating
country of production (French in the case of Austrian film CACH?, and
Arabic and Hebrew in the case of Italian film PRIVATE). Largely
because of these two cases, the Academy changed their regulations.
Were Haneke today allowed to present CACH? at the Academy, one can be
fairly sure that he would walk away with the top award. I imagine that
the odds should be quite high on Haneke finally getting his deserved
bald gold statuette in LA early next year.

Or are they? We've had a German or Austrian film nominated almost
every year in recent years. In 2008 another Austrian director, Stefan
Ruzowitzky, picked up the Oscar for DIE F?LSCHER (THE COUNTERFEITERS).
In 2007, German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck famously won
with DAS LEBEN DER ANDEREN (THE LIFE OF OTHERS). In 2002 Germany also
won with NIRGENDWO IN AFRIKA. So whilst this is a great moment for
Germanic cinema, is it conceivable that the Academy, worried about
favouring cinema from this part of Europe in recent years, could
indeed snub Haneke once again? Not only have we had these three
winners during this decade, but Germany has also had nominated DER
BAADER MEINHOF KOMPLEX, SOPHIE SCHOLL and, least we forget, the
magisterial DOWNFALL - DER UNTERGANG.

My fingers are crossed for Michael Haneke, and that he will not have
to wait too much longer for Oscar success.

And the same must be said for the other Michael. Mr Michael
Winterbottom, that is.


Reviewer:  Trist?n White

***********************************************************************
144 minutes.
THE WHITE RIBBON goes on general release in the UK on 13 November
2009, and in the United States on 30 December 2009.

From mleeper at optonline.net  Mon Oct 26 17:18:27 2009
From: mleeper at optonline.net (Mark R. Leeper)
Date: Mon Oct 26 17:18:30 2009
Subject: Review: World's Greatest Dad (2009)
Message-ID: <op.u2dun4jdy83cp7@mail-hub.optonline.net>

                       WORLD'S GREATEST DAD
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait writes and directs
     a surprisingly sharp and cynical story about success,
     public image, and fame and is about both those who have
     it and those who don't.  Robin Williams plays a
     middle-aged high school teacher who is a failure in just
     about every aspect of his life.  He is raising a son who
     is pointedly obnoxious and vulgar.  But a change is
     coming for both father and son.  This is a story of
     sharp irony and strong sarcasm.  Rating: +2 (-4 to +4)
     or 7/10

Note: The premise of this film is seen only after a plot twist and
will not be revealed here.

The title makes this film sound like the sort of wholesome family
comedy that Disney Studios would have made in the 1960s.  Nothing
could be further from the truth.  Robin Williams plays Lance, a man
who seems to be met with failure wherever he turns.  He teaches
high school poetry in an elective course that almost nobody is
electing.  Lance has tried to be a writer and after five novels
nothing he has written has ever made it into print.  He would like
a relationship with the attractive art teacher Claire (Alexie
Gilmore), but though she finds him good enough to bed, he is not
good enough to be seen with in public.  And the worst thing of all
is his repugnant son Kyle (Daryl Sabara) who hates the world--Lance
most of all.  Kyle is totally self-seeking, repulsive, and
offensive.  As a single parent Lance is being worn down and chewed
up by all that is happening in his joyless life.  But he will get a
chance to have his writing make a difference.

In some ways this film is very much like some of my favorite dark
films, Billy Wilder's ACE IN THE HOLE and Budd Schulberg's A FACE
IN THE CROWD.  It falls short of those films, but not by as much as
I would have expected from a film by Goldthwait.  (Though this is
the first movie I have seen that he directed.)  Like the above two
films WORLD'S GREATEST DAD is about the media and how easily public
opinion is formed and deformed.  With this deceptively simple film
Goldthwait is playing in the same ballpark as some of the big boys.

By now Robins Williams has been in a wide gamut of roles, but
rarely has he played someone as troubled as he is here.  His part
in this film rivals the intensity of his role on ONE HOUR PHOTO and
is probably an edge up on his killer in INSOMNIA.  One scene in
this film in which he appears on television and on the edge of
hysteria, ambiguously laughing and crying, is going to be
remembered for a good long time.  The touch of showing on the
margins posters and clips from zombie movies, Lance's favorite
genre, seems oddly appropriate to what this film is really about.

I would like to tell you what it is that this film does well.
There will probably be too many people too ready to do that.  Just
be aware this is a good film and not at all the film that the title
makes it seem.  It is not even the film you will expect it to be
half an hour into the film.  I rate it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale
or 7/10.  This film has raw language and sexual situations.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1262981/>

What others are saying:
<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1213731-worlds_greatest_dad/>


					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper@optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper

From kamhung.soh at gmail.com  Mon Oct 26 17:26:25 2009
From: kamhung.soh at gmail.com (Kam-Hung Soh)
Date: Mon Oct 26 17:26:30 2009
Subject: Retrospective: These are the Damned (1963)
Message-ID: <hc0unp$3tu$1@aioe.org>

These are the Damned (1963)
Review by Kam-Hung Soh 2009

Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey), a retired American executive holidaying 
in the tourist town of Weymouth, meets and becomes attracted to a young 
local girl, Joan (Shirley Anne Field), much to the displeasure of her 
older brother, King (Oliver Reed). King, the leader of a gang of punks, 
beats up Wells and tries to imprison his sister, but the couple escape 
in Well's boat. With the gang trailing them, the two lovers end up in a 
secret government installation and discover a terrible secret.

Made in 1961 but only released in 1963, this film quite blatantly 
exploits the public fear of nuclear war in that period (the Cuban 
missile crisis occurs in October 1962) and the collapse of the law and 
order, signified by King's gang openly roaming the streets of Weymouth 
with impunity, to justify the extreme actions of the government. Viewed 
away from that period, it's really a rather plodding film that takes a 
very, very long time to set the scene, overplays a very irritating song 
for the gang's call sign, includes an obligatory but unlikely romance 
between the leads, and casts Carey inappropriately as a middle-aged 
romantic lead. On the other hand, Oliver Reed makes a substantial 
presence as the well-dressed gang leader with a cane, quite possibly a 
precursor to Malcolm McDowell's Alex in 'A Clockwork Orange', and there 
are some fearful and gloomy scenes in the end.

1 out of 5 stars.

http://vibogafi.blogspot.com/2009/09/review-these-are-damned-1963.html

-- 
Kam-Hung Soh
http://vibogafi.blogspot.com

From kamhung.soh at gmail.com  Wed Oct 28 13:50:49 2009
From: kamhung.soh at gmail.com (Kam-Hung Soh)
Date: Wed Oct 28 13:50:52 2009
Subject: Retrospective: La Chambre des Morts / Melody's Smile (2007)
Message-ID: <hc5v96$a20$1@aioe.org>

La Chambre des Morts / Melody's Smile (2007)
Review by Kam-Hung Soh 2009

In the port city of Dunkirk, a young blind girl is kidnapped. When her 
father tries to pay the ransom, he is accidentally killed and two 
retrenched workers end up with the ransom money. Then another girl, a 
diabetic, is abducted. Without insulin, she would die within a few days.

Among the police assigned to the case is a junior profiler, Lucie 
Hennebelle (M?lanie Laurent). Her investigation leads her to an earlier 
crime scene in the local zoo, where animals have been stolen and 
mutilated by someone related to the kidnappings. As she constructs a 
profile of the kidnappers, we see a possible link between the current 
case and an earlier traumatic event in her life.

This French thriller is very similar in look to Jonathan Demme's 'The 
Silence of the Lambs' (trivia: a copy of the book is visible briefly in 
Lucie's apartment), with a lot of shots of dark corridors in run-down 
mansions and some slightly nauseating scenes involving taxidermy and 
decomposing bodies. For most of its running time, the film maintains a 
realistic tone but as the bodies pile up near the end, the conclusion 
becomes rather predictable.

French with English subtitles.

3 out of 5 stars.

http://vibogafi.blogspot.com/2009/09/review-les-chambre-des-morts-melodys.html

-- 
Kam-Hung Soh
http://vibogafi.blogspot.com

From Tristan_White at rocketmail.com  Wed Oct 28 13:52:52 2009
From: Tristan_White at rocketmail.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Trist=E1n_White?=)
Date: Wed Oct 28 13:52:54 2009
Subject: Review: Dogtooth (2009)
Message-ID: <c2221a1f-954c-4ad2-86d5-91691dacfbf0@g1g2000pra.googlegroups.com>

DOGTOOTH  ("Kynodontas")
Directed by: Giorgios Lanthimos
Review by:  Trist?n Harvey E. White
Rating: (0 to *****):    **** (four stars)

Greek cinema has never really "made it" on the world stage. This is
extraordinary, considering its geographical location: an EU country,
on the Mediterranean, and surrounded by behemoths of the arthouse
cinema: Turkey to the East, Italy to the West, with Romania not too
far to the North. You would have thought that Greece would be churning
out the movies, especially considering the successes of her bitter
rival, Turkey. But in Greece there is no equivalent of a Nuri Bilge
Ceylan, and hardly any films of note since their golden age of the
1950s, of which the most famous director, Mihalis Kakogiannis (Michael
Cacoyannis), is actually from Cyprus. Greece has never won a "foreign
language" Oscar before, and was in fact last nominated for one in 1977
with IPHIGENIA (losing, of course, to France's sickly sweet LA VIE
DEVANT SOI (MADAME ROSA), which was always going to win, given its
lead actress - Simone Signoret - and its somewhat nauseating and
patronising storyline). Who directed Iphigenia? Ah, that damn Cypriot
again, Cacoyannis.
In spite of the fact that Melina Mercouri was the inspirational
Minister for Culture from 1981 to 1989 and then again from 1993 to
1994, and did a lot to promote Greek cinema within her country, Greece
have had not a single Oscar nod since that 1977 nomination although,
to be brutally honest, Greece was robbed in 2005, as POLITIKI KOUZINA
(A TOUCH OF SPICE) really deserved to be nominated that year. Not that
it would have had a chance, sadly, since had it been nominated it
would have been up against Germany's DER UNTERGANG (DOWNFALL) and the
eventual winner, Spain's MAR ADENTRO (THE SEA INSIDE).  We'll ignore
the little fact that POLITIKI KOUZINA director, Tassos Boulmetis, was
born in Turkey, shall we?...
Why such a long-winded introduction to this review? Well, Greece have
produced a film, at last, which may actually make more than a hundred
bucks with change in cinemas outside Greece, and may actually be shown
down your local cinema in Milton Keynes or Massachusetts. DOGTOOTH is
really interesting, has been critically acclaimed at the London Film
Festival (where I saw it at an almost packed cinema in Greenwich, near
the Cutty Sark and the Royal Observatory). It's dark, it's funny, it's
intellectually stimulating, it has sex and violence, and has won so
far Un Certain Regard at Cannes no less, as well as major prizes in
Sarajevo and Sitges festivals. What a start!

Without giving too much away, DOGTOOTH tells the story of a family
trapped by a megalomaniac father figure. There's a son, an older
daughter and a younger daughter (we're never given any of their
names). The kids have grown up completely isolated from the real
world. They are terrified of leaving the house because their father
has told them that if they do, man's worst enemy (cats) will kill
them. Only he can leave the house, because he has lost his dogtooth
(canine) and it has grown back again. Only then, according to his
warped and terrifying 'version' of real life outside their garden
walls, will the cats not kill humans. If there is any influence from
outside (such as an aeroplane flying overhead) the father cunningly
pretends they are models and occasionally pretends that they fall into
the garden, so as not to confuse his na?ve children about the outside
world. Whenever they hear, somehow, a word about something from the
outside world, Mamma (a willing participant in this exercise) and
Pappa give them alternative meanings for the words. The "sea" is
explained as being somewhere to sit, a "zombie" is a small yellow
flower and a "keyboard" is another word for the vagina. Fish are
mysteriously caught in the family swimming pool by hunter-gatherer
Pappa.

In fact, there is no interaction with anyone from the outside world,
except Christina (the only person whose name is given to us in the
movie). Christina works as a security guard at Pappa's factory and, to
supplement her income, she is brought (blindfolded) to the house to
have sex, every now and then, with the son, who is now an adolescent
and understandably has urges. When Christina gets bored of the tedious
sex with the son and wishes to have an orgasm of her own, she involves
one of the daughters, and this changes the whole dynamic within the
house.

To say more would spoil the movie, although most of this does occur in
the first act. Normally, the premise of DOGTOOTH would be too
unbelievable for us to comprehend - it is occasionally even billed as
a "fantasy" film. But thanks to the terrible news lately - Fritzl in
Austria, Mongelli in Turin, not to mention equally despicable stories
from the "Sheffield Fritzl" and, lest we forget, the whole bizarre
story surrounding Jaycee Lee Dugard in the States - we can actually
watch DOGTOOTH without it appearing as bizarre as it should. We have
read so much about these awful stories that the DOGTOOTH family do not
appear to be as unbelievable as they probably would have appeared to
be had the movie been released just two years ago. Therefore, this
movie has really grasped the zeitgeist.

To be honest, director Yorgos Lanthimos has been very lucky indeed.
Or, indeed, very astute. The topic of this film is hot, it is
graspable. It could do very, very well indeed on the world circuit. It
already is doing really well, for a Greek movie at least.

The film somehow reminds me of a Dogme 95 film - the camera-work, the
narrative structure - and in its candidness is occasionally
reminiscent of Lars von Trier's IDIOTERNE (THE IDIOTS). In fact, I
would bet that von Trier would very much approve and enjoy this film,
and people who like von Trier's films will also very much enjoy it.
Storywise, though, this film is fairly unique, though of course we
have seen similar premises in M. Night Shyamalan's THE VILLAGE and
Ripstein's EL CASTILLO DE LA PUREZA (CASTLE OF PURITY).

There are some moments which some audiences may find a little
distasteful, a couple of very realistically filmed moments of
violence, and some more prudish viewers may find the sex and nudity
not to their taste. People who don't like loose ends and like to have
every question answered for them will not like it either; I for one
thought the ending was magisterial but it will not be to everybody's
taste. But all in all, this should have been a shoe-in for Oscar
nomination in the foreign film category. Particularly following its
success in Cannes, many of the Academy members who whittle the sixty-
seven films down to five nominees will have already seen Dogtooth at
other festivals, so will be much more likely to nominate it than, for
argument's sake, the latest Sinhalese road-movie from Sri Lanka.

In fact, I would have almost certainly bet money that DOGTOOTH would
have been one of the five nominees (along with, perhaps, Haneke's DAS
WEI?E BAND (THE WHITE RIBBON) from Germany, Audiard's UN PROPH?TE (A
PROPHET) from France, plus perhaps Xavier Dolan's J'AI TU? MA M?RE (I
KILLED MY MOTHER) from Canada; finally, surely one almost obligatory
film from one of the "developing" countries. But I think DOGTOOTH
would have been up there and, considering last year's unexpected win
for Japan's OKURIBITO (DEPARTURES), which beat the likes of DER BAADER
MEINHOF KOMPLEX from Germany, ENTRE LES MURS (THE CLASS) from France
and WALTZ WITH BASHIR from Israel, anything could have happened.
Websites tended to agree, with many tipping DOGTOOTH for Oscar
success, including the In Contention site. It looked even more likely
once New York based Kino Intl had secured it for US distribution.

But then, shock horror. The Greek Film authorities, in spite of
officially choosing DOGTOOTH to represent their country at the Oscars,
reversed their original decision and chose Nikos Sekeris's OI SKLAVOI
STA DESMA TOUS (SLAVES IN THEIR BONDS), a movie which, to date, has
not been distributed outside of Greece, and which didn't even win at
Greece's own Thessaloniki Film Festival, the only festival of any note
to which this film has so far been submitted (indeed, that honour went
to the very short Iranian black and white film AAN JA).

I have not seen Sekeris's movie yet and international distribution
companies are hardly scrambling over themselves to get their hands on
it, so it may not be easy to get to see it here in London. Not that
the story really appeals to me: a period drama about the bourgeoisie
in Corfu in the early 20th century. It may be good. But I doubt
whether it will be chosen by the Academy because I doubt that many of
the voters will get much of a chance even to see this film. Whereas
many of them would have already seen DOGTOOTH at Cannes and many other
festivals around the world.

A lot of good films have been left out of contention. There was
general surprise that Spain did not even have Almod?var's ABRAZOS
ROTOS (BROKEN EMBRACES) on their three-film shortlist, and Italy's
decision to submit BAARIA, Giuseppe Tornatore's film in the Sicilian
language, over VINCERE, Marco Bellocchio's critically acclaimed story
about Mussolini's secret lover and their son Albino, caused some
surprises among the Italian moviegoing cognoscenti. But, at least,
Greece had shown some balls and had chosen DOGTOOTH. A week later,
they changed their mind. This is almost worse than Almod?var's snub;
Yorgos Lanthimos must have felt very disappointed indeed and sadly
Greece appears to have let slip their best chance of being nominated
again for the first time since 1977. France's 34 nominations and 9
wins and Italy's 27 nominations and 10 wins are looking even more hazy
for the Greeks.

All in all, DOGTOOTH is a great film, reminiscent of the Dogme 95
style (but not, I must stress, an actual Dogme 95 film). It's fun,
it's ballsy, it's shocking, and some of the scenes will stay with you
for a long, long time.

And, tragically, it will *not* be representing Greece at the Oscars on
7 March 2010.

Reviewer:  Trist?n White
***********************************************************************
94 minutes.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1379182/
DOGTOOTH went on general release in Greece on 22 October, and will be
distributed in France from 2 December 2009. Verve Pictures are
anticipating that the film will be released in the UK in April 2010,
and Kino Intl will soon be announcing a date for general release in
the US and Canada, so it should be appearing at a picturehouse near
you soon.