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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
“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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
While I heard the alarming reports coming from the Fukushima I nuclear power plant, an unforgettably intense sequence from “The China Syndrome” (1979) immediately came to my mind. An earthquake occurs without warning. The power plant is automatically shut down. They get a problem with the level of the coolant. The plant is on the verge of nuclear meltdown. The catastrophe of epic proportions may happen as a consequence.
Streaming for $2.99 via MUBI.com
There is a shot in “Voices from the Shadows” that shows a man in his twenties lying forlornly in bed.
Like the rest of the documentary, it exists to illustrate the miserable effects of the illness Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or ME, which is often unhelpfully called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
There is a detail in the shot that haunts me. The man has a beard, of a length and thickness unusual, and unsuitable, for someone his age. He has the beard because he is unable to stand up long enough to shave and because having his parents, or a nurse, sit and shave him as he lays in bed is messy, uncomfortable and undignified. Every morning he thinks about shaving but his reserves of energy are so limited that he has to choose between being able to go to the bathroom because he wants to shave or, later in the day, being able to go to the bathroom because he needs to go to the bathroom.
If you haven’t heard about Stephen Glass, who was a former employee of the New Republic, you may think he is a nice lad who occasionally screws things up while you watch him at the beginning of “Shattered Glass” (2003). Sometimes it’s not easy to be angry about him because he is so sweet and considerate to the people working with him. If it seems they find a problem or error caused by him, he quickly admits and apologizes to them while looking like he is nervous about whether they won’t like him any more for that. He frequently asks to them as if he wanted to check that: “Are you mad at me?”
