Far Flungers

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.

Hoping for Hope in a Philly Neighborhood

Omer M. Mozaffar

The key strength of David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012) is that the acting is so strong that we forget we are watching the movie. In those moments that the plot guides us, it takes us in some directions familiar, some directions frightening, and some directions fun. In a year that has given us a compassionate story about addiction in “Flight,” we also have this equally tender film about mental illness. I want to see this movie again, if at least because it is so happy, even though it did not have to be.

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.

“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. 

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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. 

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).

Growing up with James Bond

Gerardo Valero

I find it mind-boggling that something as trivial as an action film series could become such a constant presence in my life but that’s been the case with the James Bond movies. It’s not so much that their span happens to equal mine (to the very week, by the way) as I didn’t start following them until I was 9 years old — but ever since, they’ve always been around one way or another: from big theatrical openings to re-re-releases in the beat up movie houses of old; from Betamax tapings of network T.V. broadcasts (pausing the machine to edit the commercials), to the great looking discs of today. Every couple of years or so they have made their appearance and I’ve watched each one dozens of times regardless how good or bad they were, an odd fact for which I’ve had no reasonable explanation.

Goodbye, Smokin’ Joe

Scott Jordan Harris

“Thrilla in Manila” is available on DVD, and in six parts on YouTube.

Joe Frazier was the toughest fighter I’ve ever seen. I keep a picture of him above my bed. It preserves, in one immortal monochrome moment, the most important punch Smokin’ Joe ever threw: the left hook that floored Muhammad Ali, and retained Frazier’s world title, in the final round of 1971’s “Fight of the Century” in Madison Square Garden.

A Simple Plan

Sometimes ordinary people becoming evil are more frightening than Dr. Hannibal Lector or Frank Booth. Villains like them are downright scary, but they are basically outsiders with a monstrous nature beyond our common sense. In contrast, the characters in Sam Raimi’s crime thriller “A Simple Plan” (1998) are nice, ordinary people we can identify with, at least in the beginning. We can recognize their human wishes, desires, and motives. We can understand why they are driven into the plot while it’s getting bloodier and more complicated. As a result, it is frightening to observe them doing horrible things, and one question immediately pops up in our minds – what would I do if I were in their circumstance?

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.