Far Flungers

Almodovar’s passionate celebration of cinema: Omar Moore on “Broken Embraces”

Whether or not you believe that “Broken Embraces” is Pedro Almodόvar’s best film, one thing cannot be denied: it’s a film that so passionately celebrates cinema and the filmmaker’s love for it.

Multiple stories frame a complex narrative in “Broken Embraces.” Mr. Almodόvar trains his lens on Penélope Cruz, his muse. She plays Lena, a woman caught between passion and misery in the film, set in Madrid in the early 1990s and 2008. A film director (Lluís Homar) is blighted by the past while also recalling fond memories in the present as he hibernates in the afterglow of a vibrant affair with Lena, whom he directed during the nineties in a comedy. Back then he was Mateo Blanco. Now, in the early 21st century he is Harry Caine – a hurricane of regrets, mysteries and opportunities. There’s Lena’s husband Ernesto (José Luis Gόmez), a billionaire business magnate who has helped Lena pre-marriage and produces Blanco’s film “Girls With Suitcases.” Keeping Blanco in line and on schedule with the film is his agent Judit (Blanca Portillo), and that isn’t an easy task.

The Garden of Pleasantville

Olivia Collette

How do things work in a perfect world? The book of Genesis tells us this much: every living thing lives in harmony, food is plentiful, there is no such thing as pain, and nobody knows the difference between good and evil.

That’s the loophole the serpent uses to convince Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. “God said not to because I’ll die,” she protests. “You won’t die,” the serpent says. “You’ll just be wiser, like God, and see things the way he does.” So Eve eats the fruit because she can’t conceive of anything that isn’t perfect, and if God is wise, then wisdom is perfect too. As for Adam, the Bible never really attributes any motive to his deed. He just seems to take the fruit from Eve without question.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s the superhero genre!

Krishna Bala Shenoi

Back then, I could watch Max Fleischer’s Superman cartoons forever and never get bored. Today, the case is almost the same. Oh, those films have some of the finest animation I’ve ever seen–even by today’s standards, the animation is phenomenal, right from the fluidity of the movements of the characters to the uncanny weight of the objects. The characters and objects had shadows too.

The right hand of great directors

Anath White

Awards season again. Last year, as you may recall, a many months pregnant Natalie Portman received the Oscar for Best Actress for “Black Swan.” Her lithesome acceptance speech, without notes, thanked many colleagues she knew had helped her stand there. As both a lifelong moviegoer and a worker on films, my spirit lifted at these words: “There are people on films that no one ever talks about, that are your heart and soul every day, including Joe Reidy, our incredible A.D…” Along with so many others, I was thrilled by her sentiment — and especially pleased for Joe Reidy.

Remembering Mike Wallace

Anath White

News that the incomparable journalist Mike Wallace has died brought back a story. In a life filled with remarkable and dramatic events, it is perhaps among the most memorable but little told. It happened in Iran in 1981.

In early 1979, the Iranian Revolution burst upon the world, forcing out the widely-hated, long-serving despot, Shah Reza Pahlavi, and bringing the exiled Islamic fundamentalist Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power. Anger at America, whose policies had supported the Shah and interfered in Iran’s politics for decades, was widespread, as thousands of Iranians demonstrated daily in the streets, and Khomeini denounced “the Great Satan.” That November, revolutionary students stormed the American Embassy in search of C.I.A. files, taking the 52 staffers present hostage. It was a siege that would last a seemingly infinite 444 days, becoming an American sensation on the nightly news (ABC’s “Nightline” was created to cover “the Iran hostage crisis”), and profoundly influencing the outcome of the 1980 Presidential election.

The world has changed, Mr. Bond

Omer M. Mozaffar

Sam Mendes’ “Skyfall” (2012) provides us with one of the best of all the twenty-something James Bond films. It is full of toys, though a different set of toys than we might expect, placing far more focus on the heroes’ stories than the villain’s plotting. Is there even a real Bond-girl in this movie? And, what about the Bond car? It seems strangely familiar. Rather, whatever traditional Bond characters and trinkets this film skips or skimps on, it replaces with gigabytes of substance. Like you, I have seen all the Bond films – most of them multiple times – even though some of them are just not that good. But, they are James Bond movies, so it becomes almost a duty to the Queen keep up with them as times continue to change. This one, thankfully, is fantastic.

Salvation by Slugfest

Omer M. Mozaffar

Religion takes you from darkness into light, and David Fincher’s deeply religious “Fight Club” grows darker and darker still. Here, piety is anarchy; anarchy is destruction; self-destruction is ecstasy. It plays whimsical department store music while its broken shark teeth chew at you. Its sound, consistent plot leads straight to an abrasive, perhaps annoying schizophrenia. It is the Bodhisattva, Satyagraha, and the Masnavi mashed up and played backwards with the wrong device. This movie is the anti-movie, and it enjoys every moment of it.

But didn’t they just now meet?

Pablo Villaça

In “Certified Copy,” his most recent movie, director Abbas Kiarostami adopts an intriguing and surprisingly efficient narrative strategy: after structuring the first half of the film emphasizing the realism and naturalism of the situation and of the dynamic between the characters, he changes the internal logic of the movie in the second half in a subtle but clear way, investing from then on in a tone that flirts with fantasy by establishing a fascinating game involving the main couple.

Written by the director himself, the movie begins with a lecture given by the writer James Milles (Shimell), who has just released a book that defends the importance of replicas of great works of art in a general way. Attending the event is the character played by Juliette Binoche, who owns a gallery and seems to be fascinated by Milles, offering to take him on a tour in Tuscany before he leaves Italy. Disagreeing with some aspects supported by the author in his book, she initiates a discussion while they visit museums and restaurants, until something curious eventually occurs and they start to act and talk as if they were a couple with 15 years of marriage.

Dear Mr. Robert Zemeckis Sir

Krishna Bala Shenoi

Dear Mr Robert Zemeckis Sir,

My name is Forrest. Not Forrest Gump, but Forrest Narayan. I am ten years old.

I have two brothers and their names are Marty and Satyajit and Marty is twenty years old and Satyajit is six and three quarters.

Waltzing with the in-between

“Take This Waltz” materialized out of a humid summer day in Toronto and made me tremble and fall in love… with who or what I’m not sure; the city yes, and maybe the idea of the in-between.

There is something incredibly delicate and beautiful about the thought of in-between: of that space of the possible, of movement, of choices being sought and yet to be made, of freedom and abandon and all the stuff that dreams are made of, but yet to solidify. It is a place of alchemy. Some call it a moment – a fleeting moment.

A boy’s best friend is his mother

It’s quite easy for someone to enjoy film. Loving film is completely different. For those who see films enjoy them, yet only those who can read film truly love it and understand it as an art form.

Hitchcock is probably the most well known director of all time. There is no absolute answer to what his crowning achievement is. A lot of critics prefer “Vertigo.” Taste varies from one film lover to the other. “North by Northwest”, “Notorious”, “Vertigo”, “Rear Window”, “The Birds”, “Shadow of a Doubt”, “Strangers on a Train”, “Rebecca”, “Suspicion”, “The 39 Steps” and “Psycho” are among his most loved.

The truth is there is no such thing as one ultimate Hitchcock masterpiece, there are only favorites.

Our neighbors the sociopaths

While revisiting David Michôd’s “Animal Kingdom” (2010), I wondered what it was like for its passive teenager hero to live with his heroin addict mother at their small home. We can only assume that she definitely could not get the Mother of the Year award, considering the mundane but eerie opening sequence. It’s around afternoon, and her son is watching some TV show, and she seems to be asleep next to him on couch – but we soon learn she died from an overdose.

“Unforgiven” was Eastwood’s turning-point

Gerardo Valero

Clint Eastwood is one of the few filmmakers whose work I always attend on his reputation alone. This is not to say they’ve been classics (think of his orangutan movies) but when entering a theater I can be reasonably confident, worst case scenario, of seeing something above average.

Eastwood has had several defined periods, such as his Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and the cop pictures of the 70s and 80s (which arrived a bit late here in Mexico because “Dirty Harry” was censored). In a career that spans five decades and included dozens of features, a single splits it into Pre and Post, and that film is “Unforgiven.” It’s hard to think of a single feature that puts into perspective a filmmaker’s career like this one does for Eastwood, and it opens the door to his current stage which has included some of his best work.

Mapping Out the Line

Michał Oleszczyk

Terrence Malick’s return to movie-making in 1998, preceded by a twenty-year period of largely mysterious retreat, was a tremendous event, the result of which – “The Thin Red Line” – exceeded any expectations one might have had at the time. I can still recall four consecutive evenings in early 1999, when I watched the movie repeatedly at the local cinema in my Polish hometown of Tarnowskie Góry. The first screening was so moving, I felt entranced and compelled to come back the next evening – and the next, and the one after that.

Uncle Boonmee as a video installation

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest movie “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” scored some points from me at the beginning. After the enigmatic opening sequence featuring a cow and the jungle shrouded in strange atmosphere, the following sequence with a car going along some country road drew my attention. The land was different, the trees and plants surrounding the road were also different, and the climate was also different, but the mood was somehow familiar to me.

It was not different from what I remember from our family’s occasional short journey to my grandmother’s country village. We also went there by a car, we also went along a paved country road, and I used to pensively look at the landscape outside car while a little bored in backseat.

Mogul seeks employment. Will work from home.

Steven Boone

Those dudes over there in Ho’wood have no idea what makes a movie that the people will fall in love with, only how to front-load some lackluster ideas with massive budgets, multimillion-dollar print and advertising blitzes, and lame distractions like 3-D in lieu of good stories or capable storytelling.Just as all it would take to get truly progressive social policies on the table are public officials who aren’t spineless or sociopathic, all the movies need is a creative executive who makes the sane calls, pushes for real ideas instead of bait-and-switch schemes gleaned from the advertising industry.

Pre-1966 Ho’wood (aka Hollywood) was full of such moguls. For all the racism, sexism, jingoism, and general dizziness that marks Hollywood history, it must be said that the businessmen who ran the show early on were at least in touch with audiences and filmmakers, not just baiting them with barrels of cash and empty promises of “awesomeness.” (We live in the Awesome Age, where every scrap of popular entertainment is calculated to knock you down on your ass at every instance. The general effect, though, is similar to watching a hyper kid’s melodramatic “death” during a round of cops-and-robbers. “There is nothing so boring in life, let alone in cinema, as the boredom of being excited all the time”–Anthony Lane.)

Taking the Plunge

Michał Oleszczyk

Some tricky music rights issues finally got resolved, and so Jerzy Skolimowski’s “Deep End” is back on the map, and with a recent run at Brooklyn’s BAMcinématek under its belt to prove it. A legendary specter for years – lusted after but near-impossible to track down and watch – it now arrives as part of the adventurous BFI Flipside series in a lush DVD/Blu-ray edition that will have you gasping equally at Jane Asher’s copper-red coiffure and John Moulder-Brown’s baby blue eyes (the latter firmly fixed on the former throughout the movie).

The Caustic Cruelty of Remorse

Omer M. Mozaffar

I find it easy and necessary to forgive the sources of my wounds. Most of them. I find it impossible, however, to forgive others for wounds inflicted upon my loved ones – especially my friends, siblings, children, and parents – even when the victims themselves are forgiving. But, most of all, I’m often imprisoned by my own remorse for the real and perceived impact my choices have had on others. Remorse is a vicious debt collector that knocks on the door to my heart on its own erratic schedule. Such is the case with Will Smith in Gabriele Muccino’s “Seven Pounds” (2008).