These Movies Matter

DVDS Worth Watching, Dec 3, 2006

How to Get the Films We Recommend:

Sources for the movie titles we recommend can be found by clicking the "read full review" link at the end of each critique below.

• Featured Title(s)
• Recommended Titles
• Classics
• Worth a Mention
• Better Mainstream
• Our Boxed Set Pick(s)

Firstly, apologies for our first late issue – ever. Beautiful British Columbia has suffered severe wind and rain-storms resulting in no power, followed by severe snow which resulted in further days without power – which translates to no computers. However, we think this very unusual situation has now passed and we should be back on track. In other bad news, we just learned that the widely advertised for this week release of the Bhutanese Tibetan Buddhist film Milarepa, has been delayed until June, 2007. On the up side for those of you who have superlative home theatres, Digital Video Essentials, the industry standard for testing and configuring your home theatre set-up, is now available in HD DVD in both 1080p and 720p. Get it from amazon in either the US or Canada.

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Featured Title(s)

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A SIMPLE CURVE, 2005, 94 min., Color

Genre: Drama
Release Data: November 2006
Director(s): Aubrey Nealon

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What It's About: Caleb is the son of hippie, draft-dodger parents who left the US to go back to the land in British Columbia’s Slocan Valley. His mother has recently died and he and his father, “Hash Oil” Jim have a failing cabinetry business on their hands, because Jim is far better at working with wood than people. Still determined to achieve the paradise he dreamed of as a young man, Jim spends his time contemplating his reverence for woodworking, expounding on geodisic theory, and extolling the benefits of soy milk. At twenty-seven, Caleb is finding the ever-shrinking parameters of small-town life and the pressures of trying to keep the business afloat a bit more than he signed on for and wonders if he should step out on his own. Into this scenario comes Matthew, an old friend – and rival – of his father’s who returned to the US as soon as the draft-dodgers were pardoned and has become rich through eco-tourism. Matt makes Caleb an offer that will save the business but a small deception changes everything and forces Caleb to finally chart his own path.

What to Look For: Who will reach maturity first – Caleb or his father? Told with wit and warmth, this film is as meticulously crafted as the chairs Jim labors over in his wood-working shop. (The “simple curve” of the title refers to the lines of a chair Jim is perfecting.) For everyone who remembers the sixties – whether they were there or not. – this is a smart, funny and genuine film that is a personal favourite and deserves a wider audience.

Why It Matters: The first-time director admits the film is largely autobiographical, and the witty script has the outrageous edge that comes from the authenticity of firsthand experience. In particular, note how well he captures the blurring of the traditional parent-child relationship that seems to occur when everyone lives as equals. Shot in his hometown of New Denver (population 609) the cinematography takes full advantage of the majestic mountains, emerald lakes and lush greenery of this Canadian mountain paradise.

USA: www.filmmovement.com
Canada: Sales from: www.asimplecurve.com Nationwide rental from www.videomatica.ca

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Recommended Titles

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EDI, 2002, 97 min., Subtitles, Color

Genre: Drama
Release Data: November 2006 (Canada Only)
Director(s): Piotr Trzaskalski

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What It's About: Edi, a classic casualty of post-Solidarity capitalism, an educated man who has fallen on hard times. He lives a miserable life, with his friend Jurek, in an abandoned factory. By day, the two wander the streets collecting scrap metal that can be turned in for quick drinking money. All their activities are overseen and manipulated by the local gang leaders, two brothers of vile temperament who are the guardians of “The Princess” their seventeen-year-old sister whom they intend to keep pure and away from men. One day, they beat Edi up, and become aware that he has other resources. Edi loves books. He collects them too, storing them in a scavenged refrigerator, and reading them by candlelight. The brothers approach him to tutor their Princess figuring Edi is so ugly, there will be no problem. However, as it turns out, the Princess is already involved with a gypsy black marketer. When she discovers she’s pregnant, she seeks to protect her lover and accuses Edi of raping her, which sets him on a course that is at once heartbreaking and profound.

What to Look For: Part comedy, part drama, part fable, this is a first feature that is elevated into an unexpectedly moving parable of self-sacrifice and redemption. At first, it seems deceptively simple and bleak, a portrait that might be appropriate to a Zen story. And, in fact, we learn that the director was inspired by a tale from Zen Flesh; Zen Bones (compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki) in which a beautiful girl accuses a Zen master of having fathered her child, and, with perfect compassion, the master does not deny her statement, but accepts the responsibility, although it is untrue. In the words of the director, this is “a film where everything is stained, but the moral of the story is about clarity, friendship and true love

Why It Matters: Edi is the person we overlook, the person who lives in a slightly parallel universe. We may pass him everyday in our car, watch him push a cart full of the things we threw out yesterday. What the filmmaker wonders – and hopes we will wonder too – is what might be special about him? What secrets does he hold? The director suggests that if we stop for a moment, we might get to know this person and find that he, like us, has principles concerning life, other people, his friends, his enemies and himself. In this case, Edi turns out to display a selfless generosity that makes him a deeply human, and unforgettable, person; a man who finds a measure of serenity in the now – despite living in a world of abject poverty, squalor, and brutality. It is almost certain that his story will leave you feeling uncomfortable even as this unlikely hero touches you with his nobility.

Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources

OTOMO, 1999, 85 min., Subtitles, Color

Genre: Drama
Release Data: November 2006
Director(s): Frieder Schlaich

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What It's About: Based on the true story of Frederick Otomo (Isaach de Bankolé, most recently seen in Lars von Trier’s Manderlay) is an impoverished and illegal refugee from Cameroon, West Africa, living in Stuttgart, Germany. On a hot August day in 1989, Otomo was confronted by an intolerant and racist subway conductor who questioned the validity of his ticket. At the end of his tether, he hit the conductor… and ran. A man-hunt was mounted and when Otomo was tracked down later that same day, he stabbed five police officers before being gunned down. This thought-provoking drama speculates on what may have been behind this real-life event.

On the morning of what would be his last day in this strange and unwelcoming land, Otomo goes to a temporary employment agency where he is rejected because he doesn’t have papers – or proper shoes. He then decides to travel across town to the job exchange at the Ministry of Labor, but on the way has the above-mentioned encounter with the conductor regarding his ticket. The conductor files a complaint for bodily harms and police start their manhunt with two young officers who gladly give up their routine duties, hoping for promotion.

The immigrant hotel where Otomo lived tells the police that their quarry has been in Germany for eight years and that his rent was paid by a Catholic charity organization. As they search his room, the camera pans to Otomo praying at a church while a young minister delivers a sermon on the small gestures that can make a difference – but all that Otomo receives is a woman’s cold stare. He wanders from the church to sit sadly by the river where, surprisingly, a little girl gives him a flower. Her grandmother is sympathetic and takes Otomo to her daughter’s apartment, eventually giving him the money he needs to get out of Germany and go to Holland. He tells her it is the first time in eight years he's ever been inside a German home. Touchingly, he shares his dream of becoming a helicopter pilot with these wonderful, warm people. Then he has to leave and, on the way to freedom, he is picked up by the police.

What to Look For: The film is a chilling exploration of xenophobia – the fear of the strange and unknown, of that which is different from ourselves, and which therefore poses a threat. This attitude forces the “stranger” to live in a prison built by prejudice. That last day, it turns out, was Otomo’s birthday, and the ridicule for his scuffed shoes, the racial remarks and the general harassment were unbearable as he moved about the city with his backpack that contained – as always – some soil from his native Cameroon. This is a morally provocative film that anyone interested in the politics of human rights should see.

Why It Matters: This is a fictionalized reconstruction of the last day in the life of a man no-one knew and no-one cared about. The director depicts the despair and hopelessness of his life yet does not excuse his violent actions. The story is closely based on accounts from those who knew Otomo and presents a strong indictment of the dehumanized attitudes towards refugees found in many countries. They arrive, full of hope, seeking asylum, work, and a little hospitality, but find only hostility, racism and a generally cool welcome. The director’s minimalist style is amplified by the Freundeskreis electronica score which increases its pulse as the manhunt for Otomo progresses.

Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources

THIN, 2005, 105 min., Color

Genre: Documentary
Release Data: November 2006
Director(s): Lauren Greenfield

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What It's About: The director follows four young women (ages 15 - 30) who have spent their lives starving themselves – often to the verge of death – in their quest to be “thin.” There is brassy Polly who slashed her wrists over two slices of pizza; 15-year-old Brittany whose mother also struggles with an eating disorder; Shelly, a nurse with a feeding tube in her stomach; and Alisa who joined the army so that she could lose weight. These women have tiny shrunken bodies and, it turns out, tiny shrunken minds. They are infants in terms of their ability to cope with the pressures of life, but they are willing to sacrifice jobs, relationships, even their children, in their all-consuming desire to be thin. In the pale light of dawn, they line up, numbed skeletons, wrapped in blankets, for their first weigh-in of the day. Welcome to The Renfrew Center, a South Florida treatment facility for eating disorders.

What to Look For: To see this film is to see people at war not only with food but with their own minds and bodies. These women are starving themselves to death with a discipline and a dedication that is at once mind-boggling and horrifying – and will put the average person’s desire to “loose a few pounds” into an entirely new perspective. What is going on in these women’s minds manifests as extraordinary pain and suffering that goes way beyond any vanity or desire for health. You may be shocked at the emotional, physical, and psychological ravages that anorexia produces. Altogether, the film leaves you feeling emotionally thin – which is perhaps an approximation of how anorexics feel.

Why It Matters: Director Lauren Greenfield’s background is as a photographer and her photographic eye is front and centre as it looks at the terrible costs of self-imposed starvation. The filmmaker documents the daily rituals, spontaneous friendships and startling swings between recovery and relapse that make up life at the Center.
We accompany the women on daily weigh-ins even as the staff counters the tricks anorexics commonly use to hide the fact that they’re not eating, or that they’re purging after meals. The focus here is up-close and intimate with the subjects rather than an exploration of the social and medical questions of why as many as five million people in the United States – most of them women – are suffering from anorexia and bulimia. It’s said that the camera adds pounds, but these women don’t look fashionably slender, the look as though a breeze might blow them away. Note how, like many drug addicts, these women return to their old ways – and their “thin” lives after leaving the safety of the clinic.

Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources

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Classics

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THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE, 1991, 98 min., Subtitles, Color

Genre: Drama
Release Data: November 2006
Director(s): Krzysztof Kieslowski

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One of the most celebrated works from the late, great Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, this classic explores the idea that each of us is matched somewhere in the world, by our exact double - someone who shares our thoughts and dreams. Here, the luminous and spell-binding Irène Jacob plays two women who not only look alike, but whose lives and emotions seem to be entwined on planes beyond the merely physical. They are, and yet are not, identical. As the film opens, Polish Weronika has given up her career as a pianist, due to an accident, and is visiting her aunt in Krakow to promote a new career in singing. Cut to a tour bus from France passing through the Krakow central square. Looking up, Weronika is drawn to Véronique, whom she recognizes in that moment as her exact double. Véronique, however doesn’t register Weronika, By chance, Weronika wins a place in a famous choir, but as she is singing she collapses on the stage…. Cut back to Paris where Véronique is contentedly making love. Suddenly, however, she feels a bolt of sadness, a pervasive sense that something is missing and that she is out of place with the universe. As a result of this experience, Véronique decides to give up her own plans for a professional career in music to become a teacher – and finds herself teaching her class the same choral music that Weronika sung. Then she has another chance meeting, this time with a man, Alexandre. Clues begin to arrive connecting the three of them together and the narrative morphs again, this time into an emotional jigsaw puzzle, which Kieslowski typically asks us to enter without worrying too much about where he is taking us. This film suggests mysterious connections of personality and emotion, but with no precise narrative. Interestingly, we understand that Kieslowski's original idea was to create several slightly different versions of the film, to play in different theaters. If a viewer saw Véronique twice at different places, the story might change like a favorite bedtime story in which a phrase is altered or a scene added or dropped with each telling. There would be no "right" way to see the film. The idea was too impractical and expensive to be more than a thought, but the notion suggests the best way to approach this enigmatic story. And, on its own poetic terms, this film does work.

Notes: 2 discs, Criterion Collection

Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources

PANDORA'S BOX, 1929, 133 min., BW

Genre: Drama
Release Data: November 2006 (US Only)
Director(s): Georg Wilhelm Pabst

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The film that catapulted silent screen star, Louise Brooks, to international fame and made her “the icon of the Jazz Age”. One of the last silent films ever made, its director encouraged Brooks, then a middling Hollywood star, to pack in her studio contract and go to Weimar-era Germany. The hedonistic heroine, Lulu, was the definitive 1920s vamp, who drew men and women alike to her magnetic flame. Her character has subsequently become the subject of an on-going stream of films, however, at the time of its release, this initial version was unappreciated in the US where the New York Times of the day found it “a disconnected melodramatic effusion in which there is an attempt to depict a thoughtless, attractive woman and her unsavory experiences.” Lulu, a cabaret dancer, is the flirtatious mistress of wealthy socialite newspaper publisher, Dr. Peter Schoen, whom she hopes to convince to marry her. But Peter is distracted by his need to break off their affair and marry the far more respectable Charlotte von Zanik, in order to preserve his social standing. The devastated, Lulu tries her seductive best to change her lover’s mind by pulling a series of admirers, both male and female, into her orbit. Flashing a radiant smile here and a sensual glance there, Louise Brooks gives us a mesmerizing performance that is at once both erotically charged and childishly innocent. But, eventually, things do unravel and, as the result of an accident involving a pistol Lulu finds herself in court, convicted of killing her lover.

Notes: This is a silent film with a very few dialogue cards in German, which are subtitled in English.

Do not confuse with the Jeffrey Lau film of the same title, which is based on the Chinese classic The Journey to the West (DVD released January 1998, Canada Only)

Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources

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Worth a Mention

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ANDY WARHOL: A DOCUMENTARY FILM, 2006, 240 min., Color

Genre: Documentary
Release Data: November 2006
Director(s): Ric Burns

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The story of iconic cult pop artist, Andy Warhol, who changed the way we see the world by eradicating the distinction between commercial and fine art, and dissolving the lines between painting and photography. However, despite endless public press and the label of “genius”, Warhol remains an enigmatic figure, dedicated in our minds – and his – to the championing of the shallow. This new biography attempts to illuminate its subject’s alleged dilemma between his “aura” and his “product” by chronicling his life from the point of view of scholars rather than the “famous” with whom he surrounded himself. The entire first half of the film focuses mainly on his early life and manages to come up with a lot of new material that may help to explain where he came from and the early experiences that helped to mould his character. A frail and effeminate child from a poor family in Pittsburgh’s Czech immigrant community, Andrew Warhola was always painfully shy and ashamed about his physical appearance. As a child, he quickly developed the primal longing of the outsider, nose firmly pressed to the glass separating him from beauty, glamour and fame. Although he would never overcome his blotched skin, bulbous nose and early hair loss (concealed under a series of bad wigs) he would become famous himself and the ultimate voyeur of fame in others. Early on, he perceived mass culture as a malleable substance which could create fame – a discovery that led to his own meteoric ascent to the top of the New York art world. His own rising star was a beacon to a richly diverse crowd of misfits who saw him as the fellow outsider who had figured out how to be famous. Although the second half of the film completes Warhol’s story, ending with his death in 1987, the wonderful material on his early life, much of it rare and new, is really the heart of this film and the main reason to see it. This is an always absorbing, occasionally revelatory, portrait of a man whose very existence is important because of what it tells us about ourselves as a society in which every aspect of life has become a commodity. Narrated by Laurie Anderson, the film features interviews with many of its hero’s contemporaries. The filmmaker (brother of Ken Burns of Civil War fame) manages to insert a keen sense of humour by highlighting the whole Warhol mystique through a series of juxtapositions, such as the experts whose comments are immediately contradicted by those of the following expert. This is an intellectual history of Warhol, that bucks the previous trend of filmmakers to cover him through star-studded biodocs; here, the hope is clearly to present something more profound. And, despite being four hours long, it is – like its namesake – always entertaining

Notes: The director is certainly acquainted with fame having been the Editor of the 72nd – 76th Academy Awards.

Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources

INNOCENCE, 2004, 122 min., Subtitles, Color

Genre: Drama
Release Data: November 2006 (Canada Only)
Director(s): Lucile Hadzihalilovic

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An eerie little first feature that isn’t quite science-fiction, but is more a fantasy-based parable about childhood and growing up. In a boarding school for girls, surrounded by woods, the pupils arrive in coffins as small children and are quickly taught the importance of obedience and, especially, the strict rules forbidding escape. They are instructed in the elements of natural science and they also study dance so that they can perform for the school’s shadowy patrons. No other subjects are presented. The staff is meagre so the senior girls look after the younger ones. No-one knows how they got there and each year, some are chosen … but for wh? And where do they go? There is mystery here – but never any explanation. However, the director does give us an amazing sense of style, so if you are a fantasy fan you will likely be intrigued by this visually haunting film from Gaspar Noé’s (Irreversible) life partner.

Notes: Do not confuse with the Australian film of the same title directed by Paul Cox; one of our favorite titles and in our archive.

Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources

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Better Mainstream

Mentioned but not reviewed – these popular titles don’t really need us to publicize them, but we want you to know they’re now available on DVD.

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AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, 2006, 100 min., Color

Genre: Documentary
Release Data: November 2006
Director(s): David Guggenheim

Buy Now

Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources

CLERKS II, 2006, 97 min., Color

Genre: Drama
Release Data: November, 2006
Director(s): Kevin Smith

Buy Now

Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources

O'HENRY'S FULL HOUSE, 1952, 117 min., BW

Genre: Drama
Release Data: November 2006
Director(s): Various

Buy Now

Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources

SCOOP, 2006, 96 min., Color

Genre: Drama
Release Data: November 2006
Director(s): Woody Allen

Buy Now

Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources

WAH WAH, 2005, 120 min., Color

Genre: Drama
Release Data: November 2006
Director(s): Richard E. Grant (actor: Withnail and I, Henry and June, Colour Me Kubrick)

Buy Now

Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources

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Our Boxed Set Pick(s)

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PRESTON STURGES: THE FILMMAKER COLLECTION, Various, Color

Genre: Drama
Release Data: November 2006
Director(s): Preston Sturgees

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Notes: 7 discs: Sullivan's Travels, The Lady Ev, The Palm Beach Story, Hail the Conquering Hero, The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, and The Great Moment

Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources

BING CROSBY: SCREEN LEGEND COLLECTION, Various, Color

Genre: Drama
Release Data: November 2006
Director(s): Various

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Notes: 3 discs: Waikiki Wedding, Double or Nothing, East Side of Heaven, If I Had My Way, and Here Come the Waves

Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources

CARY GRANT: SCREEN LEGEND COLLECTION, Various, Color

Genre: Drama
Release Data: November 2006
Director(s): Various

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Notes: 3 discs: Thirty Day Princess, Kiss and Make Up, Wings in the Dark, Big Brown Eyes, and Wedding Present

Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources