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Doo Wop, cool and raw masculinity

There exist in this sometimes sad world, moments that remind you that you are alive.

You know these moments well. Blood rushes from your toes to your cheeks. Or from your cheeks to your toes. Either way you are made aware of its movement.

A great energy is felt in your jaw and in the ends of each strand of hair. Your fingers curl. Your hands turn into fists or claws. Everything is hot. You shudder violently (the energy must be flung off or you will be eaten alive).

In search of a miracle

I have never been to Lourdes, a small town near the Pyrenees in southwestern France, but, considering Jessica Hausner’s film “Lourdes,” it looks like a nice place to visit. The hotel shown in the film looks good, and they serve visitors with care and respect. The landscape surrounding the town is nice to look at; at the meadow around the tops of mountains, you can see the green land below and the other mountains covered with snow.

The crushing suspense of “Das Boot”

Wolfgang Peterson’s “Das Boot” is a tense psychological drama with a powerful anti-war message and enough nerve-wracking suspense to make your heart pound against your chest like depth charges rupturing a submarine’s hull. But before I get into why “Das Boot” is possibly the most authentic war film ever made, I’ll try to clarify which version to go for as each is almost completely different from the other.

Watching the World Slip Away

Omer M. Mozaffar

This prickly film haunts me. I am now older than James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, and Malcolm X. I am at that age where the infinite world of my childhood bedroom is now replaced by a complicated mass of interwoven needs, wants, and concerns. The soundtrack of my youth is a summer of wind blowing through fragile leaves, with katydids buzzing along. The rattling taps of rain on our roof has now given way to the plastic clicking of this keyboard and various other mechanical monsters. Under it all is an ongoing hiss of noise. I also sometimes fall into that trap of looking at today through the telescope of an idealized yesterday; that outlook is a slick valley that is difficult to climb out of and easy to slide back into. Jack Nicholson in Sean Penn‘s”The Pledge” (2001) is likewise watching the world change. More than that, he is watching his world slip away from him.

A lifetime in five minutes

Omer M. Mozaffar

Streaming free on Amazon Prime.

When I watch Roger Donaldson’s “The World’s Fastest Indian,” (2005) it makes my day. Burt Munro (Anthony Hopkins) is a contented New Zealand eccentric tinkering with a motorcycle that he dreams of racing in the Bonneville Salt Flats. It’s the story of a man trying to be the fastest motorcyclist in history. He has had the fortitude to fiddle with his bike for over 40 years until it is finally ready. Forty years. More than that, it’s a true story about a square peg poking his way through a world of circles and triangles, discovering all the different Americas. It’s a romantic comedy, for monks. Like me.

Third Star

Jana Monji

I clearly remember the first day of our only family vacation while my father was alive. My father was wearing a dapper boater “Can Can” straw hat, but the window was left too far down and it soon swooshed off my father’s head and was gaily rolling down the highway. On that particular day, he knew he was dying and that is the reason for our journey. I thought of my father while watching “Third Star,” a touching independent movie about four male friends taking a journey to a remote Welsh beach. The film’s narrator, James (Benedict Cumberbatch), has an unnamed terminal cancer. My father didn’t die of cancer, but he was bit of a dandy and always wore a hat, usually one more like the fedora Cumberbatch’s James sports at times in this movie.

The many kinds of blindness

Omer M. Mozaffar

After exploring the mother-daughter relationship and social issues in “Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire,” I decided to visit the father-son relationship and comparable issues in “The Color of Paradise.”

Majid Majidi’s work is one my favorite movies. It is a movie I enjoy from start to finish. Every time I watch it I discover new dimensions. Still, I don’t know if it is depressingly sad or filled with hope and happiness.

Confessions of an Unrepentant War Profiteer

Omer M. Mozaffar

I’ve seen scenes in this movie multiple times in multiple movies, yet I’ve never seen this movie before. Andrew Niccol’s “Lord of War,” is the story of the rise and decline of an arms trafficker (Nicholas Cage) and takes many predictable narrative steps. It is a list of cinematic clichés, from the personalities (even the names) of the characters, to the moments of suspense and surprise, to the preposterous ethnic stereotypes. It contains everything short of a protagonist dangling from a cliff or a racing bus driving through a fruit stand. Further, there is very little character development, very little revelation, and most of the characters are caricatures. Nevertheless, the final product is a thoroughly original, provocative satire that explores a violent decade of global peace and haunts you with an almost silent sinister laugh.

New English-Speaking Patriots

Omer M. Mozaffar

On a personal level, the most surprising aspect of Rashid Ghazi’s new documentary, “Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football,” is that he managed to keep it a secret and even managed the time to make it. An old friend, he personally funded and directed this portrait of a week in the life of a tightly-knit Detroit community at the beginning of their 2009 school year. A husband, a father, and tireless executive, he kept quiet about the film, even keeping his name off the original publicity. Simply: he did not want to get attacked by rampaging anti-Muslim zealots who seek to fake scandal where there is none.

“Serve the nuts. I mean, serve the guests the nuts”

I will do most anything to avoid thinking. At the hint of strenuous thought I flee. I run like the dickens. I do not want my world to be disrupted. Seventy five percent of my energy is spent repairing a glorious cocoon of comfort.

Inside this shelter there is no overhead lighting, only lamps. There are no cold mornings or metaphysical crises. Everything is as it should be. Every question is easily answered. There you will find me licking my wounds, secretly enjoying the tang of blood and pus. Thankfully, for the health of body and soul, this cocoon is under constant siege. The valiant twenty five percent of life force that remains does all in its power to destroy a sheltering that in reality is more prison than sanctuary. This twenty five percent is Saint George. The cocoon is the terrible dragon. It is death.

As Cocteau said, “comfort kills creativity.” You will find me angrily hissing this to myself all day every day. On good days I heed the wisdom of the French man. On bad ones I refuse.

From the Valley of the Wind

There is a point in Homer’s “The Odyssey” where Odysseus is washed ashore from a shipwreck.A young woman comes to his aid, rescuing him from his end. She was Nausicaa, lover of nature, and eventually serving as a mother of his rebirth. In Hayao Miyazaki’s first masterpiece “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind” he heralds a protagonist of similar inspiration, whose own odyssey and heroism would take on Homeric proportions. 

The Clothes of Kay Corleone

Pablo Villaça

Every and each year, I take a day to watch The Godfather trilogy back-to-back-to-back. If I manage to do that more than once a year, I feel even better about myself. I’ve been deeply in love with these films since I first discovered them so many years ago – and every time someone asks me what’s my favorite movie (a question that a film critic hears quite often), I never hesitate before answering “The Godfather – all nine hours of it”.

Omer Mozaffar, a Pakistani-Chicagoan, revisits “The Five Deadly Venoms” (1978)

Omer M. Mozaffar

After following the discussions of my review of “Avatar,” I decided to revisit a movie I so thoroughly enjoyed in my younger days. If you have not yet seen it, I hope you soon get the chance to watch “The Five Deadly Venoms,” directed by one of the great Martial Arts directors, Chang Cheh (1978). And, tell me what you think of it.

“The Five Deadly Venoms” has an interesting premise: A teacher has trained a team of five martial arts fighters, each in a specific deadly martial arts style — centipede (striking at high speeds), snake (able to strike while lying on the ground), scorpion (with powerful kicks), lizard (able to scurry along walls), and toad (thick skinned). Which of these five styles most resembles you? I, obviously, am most like the toad.

This movie has now taken on a new life for me, appealing in a different way than in the past.

The call girls who sank a government

Michael Caton-Jones’ 1989 film “Scandal” begins amidst an atmosphere of gaiety and innocence at the start of the 1960s. Bright, resplendent, sparkling visions burst before our eyes. Soon the tones will become darker. “Scandal” chronicles the multi-faceted sex scandal that erupted in the “you’ve never had it so good” British Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan’s conservative government in 1963. 

No Exorcist Can Handle Possession

Michał Oleszczyk

To call it overwrought would be an understatement. Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 masterpiece, butchered upon its original American release and relegated to spurious video-nasty circulation, is now returning in all its hysterical glory, as a part of Brooklyn’s BAMcinématek complete Żuławski retro, which will then move to Cinefamily in Los Angeles. Featuring what is arguably the bravest female performance ever put on film – namely, Isabelle Adjani’s Cannes-winning turn of shamanistic intensity – the film dares its viewer to enter a trance-like state, in which genres blur and mate to yield a new level of cinematic expression.

Piracy isn’t always that simple

Matt Singer wrote a thoughtful piece against piracy a few days ago here on Criticwire. I read it with great interest. And I believe that he is correct, provided that Piracy fits a certain context. Let me try and provide some background.When I started writing movie reviews, I was living in the Philippines, a third-world country. Movie-going is deeply tied into our entertainment habits. The masses, most of whom are not able to afford most forms of entertainment, at least have theaters we can go to to escape the hardships of reality.

Ali Arikan of Istanbul, Turkey on “24 Hour Party People”

Roger Ebert

With this video essay by Ali Arikan of Istanbul, Turkey, I launch my site’s new feature, Foreign Correspondents. Film commentators from all over the world will contribute their video reviews, observations, musings, philosophies and pronouncements. Ali has been an online friend of mine for untold years, and is a favorite poster on my blog. He and several other Foreign Corresondents will be panelists at Ebertfest at the University of Illinois in April.

In the wings are fine critics from (alphabetically) Canada, Egypt, India, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Uruguay. These voices are not often heard on internet sites serving U.S. movie lovers. They’ve added immeasurably to the quality of the discussions on my blog. I will link back to their blogs. Comments are open. The same thread will extend under several videos. Roger

A lesson in life

I have always wondered what it would be like to repeat a year at school, and I often thought about what the consequences of this particular action would be on my social life. This is the primary reason why I went to see the French film, “Camille Redouble” (in English, “Camille Rewinds”). As I hadn’t seen the trailer before seeing the movie, and trusting only the title — the world “redouble” in French has come to mean to repeat a year a school — I was expecting to watch the story of a young girl repeating a year of her education.

A comedy that keeps swimming

Gerardo Valero

No cinematic genre lends itself less for repeated viewings than comedy. Finding a truly funny picture is hard enough (not that you could tell from the typical reactions at a “Fockers” screening) and besides, how many times can people laugh at the same joke? Comedies also tend to age the worst. Among those that I recall once driving audiences wild here in México were “The Party” (1967), starring Peter Sellers, with all the guests falling into a pool full of bubbles, and Peter Bogdanovich’s zany screwball feature “What’s up Doc?” (1972), but watching them today mostly leaves me cold.

Kiss Kiss, Slap Slap!

Michał Oleszczyk

When I first started watching “Dynasty”, I didn’t know what the word ‘dynasty’ meant. Aaron Spelling’s oil-and-soap opera first aired in Poland in July 1990, nine years after its American premiere and a mere year after the fall of the Berlin wall. It was the latter event that had exposed my native land to the consumerist ravishment we all secretly craved. I was eight, the world became new, and even though McDonald’s was still stalling, “Dynasty” was here already: airing every Wednesday and gluing the entire nation to its old-type tube screens.