Far Flungers

Greed is maybe good up to a point

Gerardo Valero

Sequels to Hollywood hit films usually take a couple of years to arrive, maybe up to three or five or even ten, but twenty-three? Why would Oliver Stone wait this long to bring us a follow-up to his 1987 “Wall Street”? On this opening weekend of “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” there doesn’t seem to be that much of a mystery regarding the “why now?” The forces behind the collapse of Wall Street and most of the world’s economies in 2008, and their nature, couldn’t have passed unnoticed to somebody like Stone, whose name is synonymous with plots, conspiracies and the like.

The original “Wall Street” might be a product of the 1980s and it looks a dated in some ways, but if it proves anything to current audiences it’s that there isn’t much new under the sun. Like other aspects of life, the real Wall Street is ruled by cycles in which similar events seem to re-occur with time and may continue to do so again and again. Greed is not a novelty.

“Brief Encounter”: A matter of the heart

Marital infidelity is a favorite subject in films. It’s one of many taboos which audiences can explore without having to live through its challenges nor worry about its consequences. The emotional and social tumult that comes with it always provides filmmakers and actors with complex and often fiery material to work with. But because it is a social ill, it tends to be viewed through an illicit lens.

The very way these kinds of love affairs are defined speak for themselves. Adultery. Infidelity. Cheating. Marriage is a sacrament, hence anything that goes against it is cast as

The webs we weave

Omer M. Mozaffar

Philip Noyce’s “The Quiet American” is a tale of lies. It introduces itself as a noir murder mystery, but seamlessly veers into a story of man in love with a dancer, looking for redemption in his twilight.

From there it flows into a love triangle pitting an old frightened Brit (Michael Caine) against a young fearless American (Brendan Fraser). In moments of crisis, the American saves the Brit’s life. In a moment of anger, the Brit seems to allow the American’s death.

Night train to nowhere

Michał Oleszczyk

This complete film is on YouTube in eight parts, Russian with English subtitles, starting here.

The opening shot of Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s “Night Train” (1959) is an overhead one: we see the human swarm of the Polish city of Łódź, presented as an unruly collection of points moving up and down a vast staircase. They all seem pitted against one another by some unseen pinball player – and yet never quite collide. The perspective we are forced to assume is almost cruelly impersonal in its design: if one squints one’s eyes, one could see it all as a whirring bacteria colony under a microscope. Had it been not for Wanda Warska’s moody jazz hum (a variation on Artie Shaw’s “Moon Ray”), the shot would seem unbearably cold and detached. As it is, with the wistful music trickled all over the image, it’s just very, very sad.

The man who decided to go along

Charlie Schmidlin

Shrouded behind the frostbitten windows of an idling vehicle, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) peers out at the snow-covered French countryside where a political assassination takes place. Driven by another member of Mussolini’s Fascist government, the jittery man in the backseat has traveled through the night to reach this mission, but it is in the journey that Bernardo Bertolucci’s striking 1970 drama, “The Conformist,” takes shape. An adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s 1951 novel, the film details the inner working of cowardice, using Marcello as a supposed idealist defined by his cage in 1930s Italy, and through his pitiful struggle against independence explores its futility at every turn.

What Makes a Really Good Bad Guy

Olivia Collette

I realize I’m a minority on this one, but I actually liked Bane for much of “The Dark Knight Rises.” Even with most of his beautiful face covered up, Tom Hardy has a talent for effective physical acting. Each time Bane entered a room, he would clutch his collar, forming two fists that seemed to guard his chest. In that simple gesture, he established a commanding presence while subtly implying a defensive pose, his hands near his weak spot, poised to protect the mask.

Why video games are indeed Art

A few days ago, I was one of many critics who panned the film SUCKER PUNCH. Though I hadn’t written my own, I advocated several reviews that I felt reflected my sentiments.

Though I agreed in their disapproval, two words kept on reappearing with each negative review I read: “video game.” To say that the film draws greatly upon video game aspects is accurate. But with each citation, my fellow critics continue to beat the dead horse of an argument that video games are a meaningless form of mindless entertainment.

I grew up on movies and on video games, and love and respect what they bring to the table. Though I enjoy them on different levels, they both have given me moments of wonder and serious reflection. As an avid gamer and film lover, I find it a shame to see how one medium has gained artistic acceptance while the other continues to be derided by the mainstream. There are many reasons why they are looked down upon, but if you give them a shot, you just might conclude that video games should be considered art.

“They’re young, they’re in love, and they kill people”

I remember the first time I watched “Bonnie and Clyde” like it was yesterday. I was seventeen years old and eager to broaden my knowledge in film. On weekends, I would go watch classic movies at my paternal uncles’ who was a film buff himself. The only way to watch a movie uncut in Egypt was to purchase the video cassette from Europe or the USA and import it.

That is exactly what my uncle would do. His collection of UK video cassettes kept me busy for months. Every week I would visit him and we would watch one of Hollywood’s classics together. It was there, at his living room filled with movie posters, that I was first introduced to such memorable characters as Norman Bates, Antoine Doinel, Tommy DeVito, Hal 9000 and of course Bonnie and Clyde.

Swimming an ocean of emotions

Omer M. Mozaffar

There are some American suburbs that are notorious for their high concentration of high powered parents who excel in their high class careers, spare no expense in raising precisely crafted children, and in the process completely abandon themselves, their spouses, and their children. That is one level of Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants.” This is such a rich movie that I’ll have to watch it a few times to fairly appreciate all of its layers.

Is Bill Maher a performer, a preacher, or a pimp?

Omer M. Mozaffar

On Netflix and Amazon Instant.

Considering that we normally think of documentaries as some sort of academic discourse at the fringes of popular cinema, this relatively new genre of Celebrity-driven docs is something peculiar. That we now watch documentaries starring Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, and Bill Maher is something inevitable, I suppose. We already have that tradition of following on-screen directors as characters in their features, including Kevin Smith, Spike Lee, and Woody Allen. But, the point here is that we watch some documentaries because of their host celebrities, more than the topic, even though the topics seem to be extensions of those same celebrities.

I suspect few people outside of his fan base will watch this movie: in Larry Charles’ documentary “Religulous,” (2008) popular Television talk show host Bill Maher is a playful microphone-toting cynic, roaming the landscapes of Christianity, with a few references to Judaism, Islam, and Scientology. The film is very strong and vastly entertaining in finding absurdities in absurd places, but fizzles when it attempts any serious commentary.

Six keys to “Cloud Atlas”

Omer M. Mozaffar

“Cloud Atlas” (2012), directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, is a thing of beauty, the likes of which I have not seen in American Cinema. While I regard Rian Johnson’s “Looper” as easily the best film of the year thus far, this film might be the best film of the decade. Nevertheless, considering how many people walked out of the screening within the first hour, I suspect that this film will successfully alienate or confuse most of its viewers, earning more appreciation in the years to come, long after most of us have expired. If you have the patience, it might take forty minutes to begin to understand it, and to subsequently immerse yourself into it. In that way, it also reminded me of Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” (2011). It is that good. It is so good that I can tell you everything about this movie, and I will still have told you nothing.

Political Persecution, American Style

Omer M. Mozaffar

Just a few months ago, our President signed the National Defense Authorization Act 2012 after almost unanimous bipartisan support in both the House and Senate, while the media almost unanimously ignored it. This is that same troubling act that permits indefinite detentions of American citizens without trial. There was a time in our recent history when we were debating over trials for so-called Enemy Combatants detained in Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo; the debate was over whether the trials should be military or civilian but the consensus was that prisoners should at least get some sort of a trial.

And, there was a time when we were surprised that the CIA held secret prisons all across the globe. Well, it seems that that time was so, so long ago and we’ve been so inoculated that now not even the media cares. Now, when we walk through X-Ray machines whose companies were represented by our former Head of Homeland Security, we do not think much about it anymore.

So it is with gratitude that I mention that Line Halvorsen, a filmmaker from Norway, chose to make the outstanding documentary “USA vs. Al-Arian,” (2007) chronicling a short period in the life of a family that has been suffering what is nothing less than American political persecution right in our suburbs for over a decade. On the one hand, this is the story of America seeking to keep itself secure. On the other hand, it is the story of the impact these sometimes questionable efforts have on a family.

Kids are as solid as rock

When I watched a film directed by François Truffaut for the first time during one Sunday afternoon in 2008, I had a little expectation about the movie, which was shown on TV as “Pocket Money.” Although I was already familiar with many of Truffaut’s famous works including “The 400 Blows” (1959) or “Day for Night” (1973), I had not heard about the title, and nor did I know that its alternative title in North America region was “Small Change.” Funny thing is, I remember that alternative title very well because Roger Ebert said in the introduction to one part of his book Awake in the Dark that he still could not explain how he came to choose “Small Change” as the best film of 1976 instead of “Taxi Driver” (1976), which he placed on No. 2 on his annual list.

The death of a talk host

Anath White

Roger Ebert writes: Alan Berg was a Denver talk-radio host who was murdered on June 18, 1984. He was a goofy-looking bird, with a thin face and a bristly white beard that hid the ravages of teenage acne. He wore reading glasses perched far down on his nose, and he dressed in unlikely combinations of checks and stripes and garments that looked left over from the 1950s. When the members of a lunatic right-wing group gunned him down in the driveway of his home, they could not have mistaken him for anybody else.

I was on Berg’s radio show three or four times. I listened to him as I drove down from Boulder to Denver. He was chewing out some hapless housewife whose brain was a reservoir of prejudices against anyone who was the slightest bit different from her. Berg was telling her that no one in his right mind would want to be anything like her at all.

Grace Wang of Toronto discusses “The Hurt Locker”

I am a dreamer, a traveler, a student, a teacher, a friend, a stranger, an Asian, a Canadian, a daughter, a woman, a photographer, a model, an immigrant, a citizen, a writer…but these are all just labels, and they wouldn’t begin to tell you why I have an infinite love for hole-in-the-wall bars and coffee shops and black & white everything, or why live music of any kind just captivates me, or how Chinese novels move me in a way so deep that I wish every person in the world could understand the language, or why I can never ever hold back a smile watching the sun rise on a different continent.

Traveling is a huge part of my life, as is writing. With a pen and a backpack, I’ve had some of the most memorable moments of my life at some of the most random corners around the world.

If traveling is how one experiences reality, then writing is how I weave my dreams. It has always been the most natural, intimate, and truest expression of myself. And we all just want to tell our own stories in this lifetime, don’t we?

It’s like breathing, and as clichéd as that sounds, how can you explain why you need to breathe?

A bad night for the Warriors

Gerardo Valero

If one is to make a balanced judgment of Walter Hill’s 1979 “The Warriors” it is crucial to view this film exactly for what it is, one of the most exhilarating and peculiar action films of the 1970s, famous for the riots it provoked but much closer to Greek mythology than to reality.

Clearly a cult classic, “The Warriors” can also be seen as simply a great “chase movie”, sort of a concrete jungle’s “Apocalypto.” An unusual film even in today’s terms, during times when we feel we’ve seen it all.

“The Warriors” follows the adventures of the group in what turns out to be a very bad night for them.

D D L J – Dee Dee Ell Jay

Omer M. Mozaffar

Streaming on Netflix Instant.

The movie starts out so beautifully. The great Indian actor Amrish Puri stands there with his dignity, dressed in a perfect mix of Western and native Indian attire, feeding a flock of pigeons in London’s monochrome rain-soaked concrete Trafalgar Square, thinking fondly about the sunny, colorful, musical world he left behind in the bright green and yellow fields of his home country. Twenty years of life in England, he runs a generic convenience store, with the goals of giving his daughters the life he never had. In his daydreams, however, he is longingly feeding pigeons not here, but in India.

That very short moment provided a profound insight into the lives of a whole population of first generation immigrants. But, I’d say that the movie takes a nose dive from there, and it does temporarily, because Puri seems to spend the rest of the film with a frozen glare that is frightening enough to make Indiana Jones pull out his own heart. And, similarly, I just wish that that punk Raj (Shah Rukh Khan) would stop his giggling. This is Aditya Chopra’s “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge” (1995) and it is easily one of the most popular of all Bollywood films, at least for a certain demographic of women between the ages 15 and 45, in a way that “Sholay” is the most popular of all Bollywood films for whatever male demographic I belong to.

Apocalypto: Epic in a real jungle

Gerardo Valero

I truly enjoy Mel Gibson’s work as a director. His films, whether he stars in them or not, always reflect a passion and heart like few others. His best work these days, more and more, seems to be coming from behind the camera. It seems to me he really makes the movies for himself first and second for everybody else, no test audience previews to influence the final product.

“Apocalypto” is a film about the demise of the Mayan civilization. It tells the story of Jaguar Paw, whose small village is attacked by a group of hunters from the nearby metropolis, their job literally being to pillage small defenseless groups while looking for “volunteers” for their “most dangerous game”: the sacrificing rituals that the city’s leaders use to keep the masses entertained.

Suicide by way of homicide

Omer M. Mozaffar

Rian Johnson’s hyperviolent “Looper” (2102) is the smartest movie I have seen in a long time. It has that fearless edge of an independent film, throwing out all the stops. Its masterful plot carefully hides its foreshadows as elements of its constructed universe. It is a science fiction movie with rudiments of mystery, thriller, horror, comedy and even eschatology. So many characters, young and old, were loaded with charisma, sometimes unexpectedly. My fellow critic Nick Allen was correct when he told me not to watch any trailers (too late) and not to let anyone tell me about this movie. Because of its hyperkinetic, volatile unpredictability, I cannot help but to call this movie “crazy.” After watching it, you might have to go look at snails for a few hours to calm down. More than that, this movie is clearly one of the best of the year.

A man with storms in his head

A professor at my department who studied neuroscience, once told us something you have probably heard elsewhere: If you think you’re crazy or getting crazy, that means you are not crazy because crazy people do not know that they are crazy. This sounds like the famous dilemma in Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.” I thought it was useful advice for students who had to deal with lots of pressure and stress in the academic process. It could also be good advice for the hero of “Take Shelter” (2011), because he thinks at first something is wrong with his head, but cannot ignore what disturbs deeply him. He tries to quell his mental turbulence as much as he can, but is transformed into a more disturbed man obsessed with visions attacking him every night. It is possible that he himself is the threat to the family he wants to protect, not the catastrophe of epic proportion he fears.