Repression, Punishment, Guilt...ah, movies to love.

The front-runner for the 2009 Best Foreign Film Oscar were Germany's The White Ribbon and Argentina's The Secret in Their Eyes. Both are dramas that deal with repressive communities where people must watch what they say and who they see. Michael Haneke wrote the story and screenplay for The White Ribbon, which he also directed. It's a strange film, shot beautifully in stark black and white with allusions to Ingmar Bergman in themes and characters and to the westerns of John Ford in images and compositions. A small village in northern Germany in 1913 begins to experience disturbing events: a doctor and his horse felled my a wire near his home, the local baron's small son tortured, a suicide. Is this a parable for what is to come for Germany or a commentary on the innate evil in men as seen in their children, a la Village of the Damned? Or is it just a really creepy movie with no clear answers. The director cuts from story to story without a seeming logic, but the feeling engendered is that of a vise that will finally strangle the community. The White Ribbon is worth seeing, but one is relieved when it is over and would not want to experience it again.





The same could not be said for The Secret in Their Eyes, the Argentinian film that surprised Oscar viewers by winning over The White Ribbon. Directed by Juan Jose Campanella, it is a moving meditation on politics, repressed love and speech, and the need to punish. This drama is in color and switches time periods as it releases the details of its mystery. It involves a low level legal counsel and his near obsession with solving a murder-rape case and his long unspoken love for his superior officer. After his retirement 20 years later, he tries to write a novelization of the crime. The more he investigates, the more labyrinthine and dangerous the search becomes. To say any more would perhaps give away too much, but this film is full of surprises, all of which are valid and work towards its stunning climax. The performances of the principal actors are deeply affecting so that they seem more real than most Hollywood film performances.



Both The White Ribbon and The Secret in Their Eyes are films that explore the darkness of repressed societies and desires that lead to violence and death, but only The Secret in Their Eyes offers redemption and even hope. If you rent any foreign film this year, make it this one.

Rough times for us all.

The continuing oil spill crisis has brought out the best and the worst in many of us. Coastal residents, for the most part, are doing what they can to survive the possible end of their way of life. British Petroleum is spending millions on apology ads in the media, money that should be going to the victims and to clean-up on the coast, in the wetlands, and for wildlife. And the media has had a field day yakking about President Obama's lack of passion or attitude. What do they want? Do they think Obama should weep as he says "I feel your pain"? Sorry, that one's taken. Do they want a raging fury that promises Armageddon for BP? These are not the man Barrack Obama. He is a man who feels, but he is also a methodical and logical thinker, one who studies a problem, consults with the best minds, and then acts. Since he was elected he has been attacked, especially by the GOP and the crazed right wing fringe for everything he has supported. Whether it is the oily Rush Limbaugh, the innane Sarah Palin, the lunatic Glen Beck or the daily sniping of cartoonists like Mike Lester of the Rome News Tribune, Obama has been viciously attacked for acting or not acting. In all of this, the civility that needs to be in public discourse is sadly missing. And it seems likely we won't see it again for some time. But at least there should be a moratorium on damning the President. Show some respect, folks!

BEST IN SHOW...still the Best!

Tonight we are watching director Christopher Guest's classic comedy BEST IN SHOW, co-written by Guest and Eugene Levy, both of whom have key roles in their film. We have watched this movie many times, often to alleviate boredom or even depression, but now it's summer and nothing is on the telly or here from Netflix. Guest and his usual troupe of parody actors made their biggest mark with WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, a witty look at a small town drama group's effort to mount a major production. Needless to say, everything goes awry, and the laughs abound. Guest helped spur the documentary, straight to the camera style that is so popular in television today (THE OFFICE, 30 ROCK, MODERN FAMILY).

BEST IN SHOW uses this technique to perfection. The major characters and their dogs are headed to Philadelphia for the annual Mayflower Dog Kennel Show. Any similarity to the Westminster show is purely intentional. As they prepare for the show, the characters get into ridiculous situations that expose typical American foibles that are not exclusive to dog owners.
Guest plays Harlan Pepper, an amateur ventriloquist whose dog is a bloodhound. Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy are a childless couple devoted to their Norwich Terrier. Their main problem is her past lovers who seem to show up at all the wrong times. Then there are Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock as J. Crew preppies who met at Starbucks, actually one shop facing the other in a big city. Their neurotic behavior is seen in their nervous Weimaraner who sees a dog psychiatrist. Jennifer Coolidge is the buxom young blonde wife of an doddering octogenerian (think of Anna Nicole Smith) who has hired Jane Lynch as her trainer for their white poodle. Lynch here is a prototype for her role on GLEE, domineering, emasculating, even trying to psyche out the other contending trainers. Rounding out the owners are Scott Donlan and Michael McKean, the gay owners of Shih Tzu. For 2000, they are the best and least of stereotypes; the younger is flashy, the older is more reserved. They have some of the wittiest lines in the film. And to top it off, there is Fred Willard as the co-host of the show, a man who has no clue about sports or anything else. His hilarious non sequiturs are fine on their own but even better as we watched the restrained pain of his co-host, a knowledgeable Brit.

Too often parody can be cruel but not here. Though the characters are outrageous at times, they display humanity, with the exception of the preppy couple. BEST IN SHOW is one of the great comedies. I would rank it with classics like SOME LIKE IT HOT and TOOTSIE. And compared to the slovenly slacker gross-outs on the screen today, Christopher Guest's film is a masterpiece.

"I'm LOST without a clue!"

Earthquakes, volcanoes, black smoke, plane crashes, deep and dangerous mines. No, I'm not talking about recent news events. Quirky characters, meaningless chases, unbelievable underground scenery, scary monsters. No, I'm not describing Tim Burton's eviseration of Lewis Carroll's ALICE IN WONDERLAND. You guessed it...LOST's long-awaited and long on lack of logic finale. Robert Bianco, USA's tv critic gave this muddle four stars and called it one of the great finales and series in tv history. I generally respect this fellow's opinions, but I think he got suckered big time.

Granted, I am not an avid fan and I have never been on line with rabid LOST devotees, but I have watched the show over the last six years and have grown fond of some of the characters.
One of the cardinal rules of LOST is to kill off characters that viewers like. A prime example is the beautiful relationship that developed between Sun and Yin, played with warmth and sensitivity by Yunjin Kim and Daniel Dae Kim. The couple struggled against almost impossible odds only to be torn apart time and time again. In this year's final season they are finally together only to drown with each other. A number of other viewer favorites also bit the dust.

But, lo, the writers and producers of LOST have wrought many miracles, none greater than bringing the entire cast, dead and alive, back for the finale. How? In the last century when I was teaching Coleridge we would discuss the importance of "the willing suspension of disbelief." This divided classes into two warring groups, the realists and the imaginists. Frankly, I have always sided with the latter group and remain a staunch romantic. However, LOST has stretched this axiom beyond the breaking point with the use of flashbacks, flashforwards, parallel times, the disappearance of the island, and even a trip to the 1970's, which might be a worse fate than being on that island with a bunch of warring creeps.

Last night's finale shattered any hope of tying up all the loose ends. People are debating the meanings, religious or otherwise, but in the final analysis we got a giant cop-out. Jack, our hero by default, saves the island but dies in the process just as the plane takes off with some of the original survivors. We have been cutting back and forth to what we thought was a flashforward. It turns out we have been prepping for the show's funeral. Jack enters a church where he meets not only his father whom he never got to bury but also most of the cast. Have they all died? Did they die at the first of season one and all that followed was a fantasy tease? Did some escape and re-start their lives? All we really know is that Jack is in a heavenly church with his former friends and enemies in one great love-in. And as the music swells lugubriously, Jack walks through the door into blinding light. I thought this was LOST, not TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL.
Did Coleridge fail me or was it those guys at ABC?

Time to get back to Basics

If you've seen any American movies lately, you know that they are in dire shape. The industry has fallen for the newest craze--3 Dimensions. Though AVATAR uses stunning three-dimensional technology, the story is trivial and threadbare. How many big budget action films condemn American industrial and the military complex while taking full advantage of both? The first IRON MAN, GI-JOE, the X-MEN franchise, the list goes on and on. So what's missing from these films?

Try plot, character development, meaningful and often witty dialogue. A few recent main stream movies have attempted to adapt the process after filming and they have been limited in their success. Tim Burton's beautiful but meandering ALICE IN WONDERLAND lost itself in special effects and make-up and forgot Lewis Carroll's inventive wordplay. Perhaps Burton thought audiences couldn't handle verbal cleverness, which is surprising when one considers some of his better films. A much lesser success was the joyless CLASH OF THE TITANS, which managed to make us long for the original production (1981) with Lawrence Olivier as Zeus and Harry Hamlin as a pretty boy Perseus and Ray Harryhausen's famous stop-motion special effects. Remember Medusa and those creepy scorpions?

Did summer movies once have plot, character development, and witty dialogue? You have to head for Netflix, but they still entertain far more than the current crop. Think of Robert Shaw as the salty and slightly daffy boat captain or Richard Dreyfuss as the marine biologist in JAWS. What about Karen Allen and Harrison Ford exchanging both verbal and physical blows in perhaps the greatest of all adventure films, RAIDERS OF THE LAST ARK? And then there are classic series such as STAR WARS and THE LORD OF THE RINGS, whose unique appeals captured viewers of all ages and intellectual backgrounds. Time and time again American audiences have shown they can enjoy intelligent, story-based, character-driven action films. But Hollywood just doesn't seem to get it.

We can hope the business, and it is a business, will improve, but demanding more is our job, not theirs.

Two strong contemporary novels

I am always looking for great reads. I have just finished two wonderful books that have a lot to say about our world today in entertaining, often surprising ways. Rather than being political polemics, they approach their topics with suspense, humor, and drama. The first of these is Adam Haslet's UNION ATLANTIC, a prescient novel about a soulless stocks trader and an aging blue blood who opposes him. Doug Fanning is second in command at Union Atlantic, a world-wide commodities firm. He is one of those charismatic young men who woo both men and women with their ambition, charm, and success...but not Charlotte Graves, an old school Bostonian liberal who wages war against Fanning over his utra MacMansion built right next to her decaying home in a historic district. Complicating this conflict is Nate Fuller, a grieving teenage boy who is divided in his loyalties between them. Raging beyond this personal conflict is Fanning's addiction to risky financial ventures that could bring him and his company down. The parallels between this Enron and 9/11 novel and the current financial catastrophe are obvious but not blatant. UNION ATLANTIC is a quickly paced, character-driven novel that builds to several stunning climaxes.



The popular Swedish author Henning Mankell, best known for his Wallendar novels that were adapted by BBC television, has written a doozie of a mystery novel laced with fascinating characters, sudden revelations, gripping descriptions of life in modern Sweden and Beijing, and moving depictions of the brutal treatment of Chinese immigrants (as well as others) during the building of America's continental railroad. The event that triggers these events is a mass murder in a tiny village in northern Sweden. 19 people, all elderly with the exception of a visiting boy, are slaughtered with a machette type weapon. There is only one clue, a red ribbon found in the snow. The leading character is 60 year old judge Birgitta Roslin, whose children are grown and whose husband is growing more and more distant. As she becomes more and more involved in the case, her research takes her into the past and present of both Sweden and China.

Birgitta's quest places her in conflict with the Swedish authorities and eventually with Beijing's highest authorities. Eventually her life is in danger because the villain thinks that Birgitta knows his or her identity. While chronicling China's rocky movement into capitalism, Mankell tightens his suspenseful plot and increasing the body count. Interestingly enough, he does not fall prey to the somewhat seedy qualities and people that undercut the novels of Stieg Larsson.

Both UNION ATLANTIC and THE MAN FROM BEIJING are novels of intelligence, suspense, and wit and would be great summer reads.

WITNESS....It's still a great movie

Last night Betsy and I watched WITNESS with our daughter Kristin and son-in-law Jared in Maryland. Betsy often used this movie in her ESL classes to point out cultural differences, and I used it once or twice in my Cinema class. How did it hold up? As we know, most movies made in and about their time periods don't age too well. But WITNESS is a rare and worthy exception.
Filmed in 1985, WITNESS stars Harrison Ford as tough, principled Philadelphia cop John Book, who is drawn by accident into an Amish community. A young Amish boy is the only witness to a brutal knifing in a public bathroom. This scene creates suspense through the use of sharp editing and close-ups of the boy as he sees the assault. His near discovery by the killer is harrowing. The investigating officer John Book is forced to go into hiding in the Amish community to protect himself and the boy from corrupt police officials he wants to expose. The stark contrast between Book's ordinarily violent life and the calm peace of the Amish farmland provides the strongest part of the film. A hardened loner, Book finds himself falling in love with Samuel's mother Rachel (Kelley McGinnis) and the Amish ways. The soothing shots of golden wheat waving in the wind and the Amish men erecting a barn while the women prepare their meal are among the most beautiful in the film. But the quiet, breath-taking images of McGinnis standing in a door with golden light illuminating her face and her simple Amish dress are the most memorable in their allusions to the painter Vermeer. Of course, we see these images through Book's eyes, which makes them even more poignant.
Austrailian director Peter Weir has given this material grace and subtlety and a perfect cast, especially Lucas Haas as the boy Samuel. Those wide, wondering eyes see so much and lead us to see even more. Time to see WITNESS again.